Re: Conlang Unicode Font (was Re: Kamakawi Unicode Font Question)

David J. Peterson wrote:
> Herman:
> <<
> The precomposed characters probably should exist in the font without a
> specific encoding. (It looks like they're in the Cyrillic range,
> probably because the default font mapping includes Cyrillic pages and I
> didn't bother to zero out the Unicode values of these extra characters).
>  >>
>
> So you think I should paste them in there without any coding
> at all?  Will someone be able to use them somehow?
Well, that's the problem and why I don't use the fonts for much of
anything. Even if you get VOLT from Microsoft and add a ligature table
to the font, there's no way to tell it that the table should be used for
Private Use characters. You could lie and say that it's Latin or
Devanagari or something, but when Uniscribe goes to render it, it sees
that the ligature table is for Latin or Devanagari, and ignores it since
your characters are Private Use.

> Herman:
> <<
> I get around that by writing "" for "kc" when the ligature should be
> used (with the "silent e" diacritic over the silent "c").
>  >>
>
> That came out as boxes, by the way (I have the font installed).
I see them on Thunderbird (Windows XP). I don't know if it's using
OlaeUni or your ConlangUnicode font to display them, though.

> Herman:
> <<
> You might need a meta tag in the head of your page (I've left the angle
> brackets off so that HTML mail readers don't attempt to interpret this
> as HTML):
>
> META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8"
>  >>
>
> Oh, the page has got that.  The problem is with the font, not the
> page.  I'm concerned that it's not doing what, at least, I hoped it
> would do (i.e., make characters appear without the website creator
> having to do anything but typing in the unicode characters into
> their page).  Did you download and install the font?  Does it work
> on the web?  I can only get it work by switching my default font
> to ConlangUnicode.ttf--which I don't want.  Neither Safari nor
> Firefox seems to just work.  I'm concerned that there's maybe
> something I should be doing to the font to get it do it that I'm not
> doing.
It looks like the specific charater U+F072 is used by Microsoft for its
own internal purposes. I tried typing "F 0 7 2 Alt+X" in WordPad, and I
end up with this checkbox in the Wingdings font.

I did a version of my home page in Visible Speech once, which is in the
Private Use area. You'll need a Visible Speech font like my Teamouse VS
(ftp://ftp.io.com/pub/usr/hmiller/fonts/tmousevs.ttf) to see it.

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/index-vs.html