Re: Um...help with unicode?

>From: Joe <joe@...>
>
>Is there such a thing as a Generic unicode font?
>
>I'm just curious...as I need to add some diacritical marks which don't have
>individual characters...and I kind of want to be able to see them...
I have been working on this issue of how to do different characters on
computers a lot over the last few days. It is so complicated. It seems there
are at least 5 parts to the structure:

1) Encoding systems
2) Character sets
3) Fonts
4) Keyboards
5) Composing and displaying applications

There is a lot I don't understand about the whole situation. In particular I
don't understand about all the different encoding systems. (It is such a
confusion.)

Encoding systems are originally based around character sets (i.e. new
encoding systems were devised to cover character sets that previous ones
didn't). But with Unicode the idea is to have one single encoding system
that covers all character sets - laudable.

But it seems a lot of things can't or don't use Unicode. So if we use
Unicode will it always work? I.e., will we be able to read what other people
are writing, and vice versa? If not, how do you get around it?

Secondly, suppose you plump for Unicode as I now am doing. (I am planning to
be writing in languages with lots of different accents, IPA, and it would be
nice to do e.g. Greek. I don't want to have to switch between encoding
systems or character sets. I don't really know how to.) That doesn't mean
you can just type or read everything. Oh no. You have to have special fonts
installed. All the old fonts are useless.

And, seemingly, there are not fonts yet for all areas of Unicode.

Next... you get Unicode up, you've got the fonts installed... now how do you
type the characters? You need a special 'keyboard'. I.e. a protocol for
interpreting keystrokes on what physical keyboard you have as characters.
(Of course you could use Character Map or an equivalent but let's face it
that is hopelessly laborious and fiddly.) So... you need to download special
keyboard drivers that link in to particular characters. If you are using
Unicode of course these must be Unicode keyboards; no other keyboards will
do. And it seems you can only type in some fonts if you have the appropriate
keyboard for them, etc. etc.

OK. You have Unicode, relevant fonts to display your chosen character sets
with, relevant keyboards to type the characters with nice and easy. Now...
where do you type them? Any old where? NO! You cannot do Unicode at all with
Notepad. Someone suggested you might be able to with Wordpad, but I have yet
to see how. MS Word, certainly, which you would expect. (But I find it a
big, clunky, cumbersome program for anything less than a dissertation. Too
many options, not easy to get in and out of.) How about Outlook Express? (I
am struggling.) Or Hotmail? How about webpage design programs? All I know is
FrontPage Express. I have yet to try it with Unicode :S.

Let's suppose you have found a way to compose neatly in Unicode, and can do
textfiles, word-processed documents, webpages, typing in different fonts and
character sets in the same piece, and hence can mix ordinary text with your
accented conlang and phonetic transcriptions. Now... will your browser show
it properly? Will it handle Unicode properly? Or all the relevant fonts?

And will your readers, to whom you have sent your masterpiece, or who are
browsing your site?

I find it all hopelessly confusing. I want to get this sorted out before I
start entering lots of data re my conlangs because I don't want to have to
retype a lot of stuff because of some incompatibility. But the trouble is, I
don't even really know what I don't know. I don't know what questions to
ask.

Hee are some of the best software and resources I have found so far:

Unicode: http://www.unicode.org/
Sharmahd Computing UniPad: very nice little text editor geared towards
Unicode, includes built in fonts and 'virtual keyboards', plus you can
design you own, check it out http://www.unipad.org/
Keyboards: Tavultesoft, these people are brilliant
http://www.tavultesoft.com/
also this one: Unicode Keyboards For Linguists:
http://people.freenet.de/LukasPietsch/Keyman/Keyboards.html
Fonts: Fonts for Scholars (David Perry):
http://members.telocity.com/~perryd/ plus he does some keyboards to go with
Tavultesoft Keyman
http://user.dtcc.edu/~berlin/fonts.html Dr. Berlin's Foreign Font Archive
only a few are Unicode tho.
And of course SIL http://www.sil.org/computing/

Can anyone help???

Mat


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