Re: TECH: Unicode and Macs

I run a Mac with OS 9.2 (maybe not as recent as you were hoping...) I
did have problems with keyboard layouts which I was able to fix by going
to http://wordherd.com/keyboards/ and creating a new keyboard layout for
the characters I needed (eth, thorn, macron vowels). Unfortunately, it
only works with my email software (Netscape 7.x). My version of
Appleworks does not support Unicode. I don't know about OS X, so I
couldn't help you there.

I got around the problem for my conlanging documents by using the Junius
Modern font, which replaces some of the ASCII characters with the ones I
needed. (Try http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/Fonts.About.html)

ā (a-macron), ē (e-macron), ō (o-macron), ð (eth), þ (thorn)



--
=============
James Worlton
          "Time flies like an arrow.
           Fruit flies like a banana."
                           --Unknown


Steg Belsky wrote:
> yet another question from me :P
>
> my computer isn't very good, and i'm thinking of getting a laptop to
> replace it with.  having suffered for 8 years with junky
> constantly-freezing DOS/Windows-running computers, i'm thinking of now
> getting a Mac.  Do any of you have a mac (with the latest version of the
> operating system)?  What's your experience of its handling of unicode and
> other conlang-necessary things?
>
> I tried out a mac running OS X10.2 today at my father's workplace, and it
> seemed okay.  One problem though was that the Hebrew keyboard layout
> didn't match up to what i'm used to - all the major letters were in the
> proper Standard Israeli layout, but the diacritics were all in different
> places.  Also, i'm used to the "US-International" keyboard layout on my
> computer now, and the 'Special Characters' or whatever they called it
> layout seemed a bit confusing.  I'm sure i'd eventually get used to it,
> though.  I also couldn't find any guide to the keyboard layouts, like a
> pop-up onscreen keyboard image or anything like that.
>
> But anyway, anyone here with a recent-OS mac?  Do you get unicode emails
> through the Conlang/culture lists properly?  I remember hearing that
> there have been problems with some non-[Modern]English characters,
> especially thorn and edh, with Macs.  Are those still a problem?  Every
> so often people send random unicode characters through here, such as
> Chinese place-names, text in Russian, Hebrew or Arabic, or the Devanagari
> |th| on Conlang from a few days ago.  Have you been able to read them all
> properly?
>
> zhoutzíí wa'esh,  (thanks) [which should have two i-acutes in it]
>
> -Stephen (Steg)
>  "if that's all you will be / you'll be a waste of time"
>      ~ from some pop-punk song my brother likes