Re: Interlinears

Paul Bennett wrote at 2006-01-05 00:33:58 (-0500)
 > On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:14:13 -0500, Tristan McLeay
 > <conlang@...> wrote:
 >
 > > BEWARE! Unicode (UTF-8) characters lurk within!
 > >
 > >> Where's all the outrage from SEA about this?
 > >
 > > SEA?
 >
 > South East Asia. All them pesky countries that actually *use*
 > furigana / ruby on a presumably often enough basis for it to be
 > part of the HTML standard for the last 4 years (which is a long
 > time in HTML years).

What are you talking about?  Japan and China aren't in South East
Asia.  Is ruby used in Thai or Khmer?

 > > My character map knows nothing about Tengwar, but that mightn't
 > > mean anything.
 >
 > The Windows (and I think Mac, and possibly Linux) default Character Map
 > applications know nothing about planes other than the BMP. You need to go
 > dig out a third party app, and/or look directly at the charts at
 > http://www.unicode.org/

Tengwar has never been part of the Unicode standard, so it isn't going
to show up on any character map.  There's a place allocated for it in
the _roadmap_, but when the proposal actually comes up there's a good
chance it'll be rejected, as Klingon was.  In any case it's generally
accepted that it's a low priority, so the situation isn't likely to
change any time soon.

http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/

 >
 > Windows comes with support for Planes but it actually needs a registry
 > kludge in order to activate it. I have no idea what the situation is for
 > other OSes. I got so pissed off by the font substitution in Linux that I
 > gave up trying to do anything clever with it.

It's impossible to say anything very general about Linux because there
are several competing systems used by different apps.  Pango, at
least, has support for Plane 1 scripts, so I can look at Deseret
etc. in Gucharmap.