This script is about to appear in many more documents and signs because the Nunavut's Official Languages Act is coming in to force to promote the Iñuit languages to be official languages alongside and English.
In addition to the languages of Nunavut, this script is used in Canada to write a number of indigenous languages including Ojibwe, Blackfoot, Cree and others. In contrast, most indigenous languages in the U.S. are written in the Latin alphabet with the notable exception of Cherokee.
I'm curious if indigenous communities in the U.S. would consider adopting this script to further differentiate themselves from the U.S. If that happens, the Nunavut law should ensure that proper Unicode support is available.
]]>If you want to replicate this you have to:
<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">
All I can say is - Wow. I wish all my CMS systems played this well with MathML.
P.S. If you send me comments on this blog, please note that this text may possibly depart from standard academic English. Linguists can do that, especially in a blog.
]]>As with many U.S. diplomas, the university name was rendered in a Blackletter (aka "Old English" or Gothic") calligraphic style font. This font though had a particularly high flourish on the lower case "v", high enough that recipients wondered if they had written a "b" instead of "v" (and who wants a diploma from the Unibersity of Iowa?).
According to the Chronicle, the administration reassured them that it was an archaic "v", but this case does highlight the legibility issues of some older manuscript fonts and the need to balance historical font authenticity with modern needs.
]]>My favorite might be an early 7-bit set which replaced the lower case English letters with Arabic letters (but kept the capiral letters). As the article notes, this worked because "Some printers were not even capable of printing lower case English letters."
It's a good thing we've moved beyond that.
]]>I wrote about this in an earlier post on JAWS 6, but today I was able to document and implement, so I thought I would share the procedure.
The fix I am using will expand the symbol set within JAWS so that a character like /ə/ will be read as "schwa" (but not as its phonetic value of "uh") Ideally, it would be nice to have a word pronunciation engine so that phonetic pronunciation values are emulated, but let's take this one problem at a time.
JAWS includes a set of symbol or .sbl files which match punctuation and symbol characters with a "word" (e.g, ? = "question mark"). The key is to add the character and reading to your working files.
Luckily, there there is a phonetic symbol .sbl file from Robert Englebretson. There's also a math symbol .sbl file from Carroll Tech.
This procedure assumes that JAWS is using the Eloquence engine, in which case the key file to change is eloq.sbl. You will also need to have an Admin account to implement the changes.
Note: SBL files can be opened in any text editor such as Notepad.
C:\Users\All Users\Freedom Scientific\Jaws\13.0\Settings\enu\eloq.sblU+0001=character name
Note: Don't worry if the format does not match the rest of the symbol list.
Each line in the SBL file has this format:
U+Codepoint=Character Name (no quotes)
For instance, if I wanted to expand the repertoire of currency symbols to include the new rupee symbol of India (₹), I would add the following to my .sbl file
U+20B9=Rupee symbol of India
A list of Unicode charts with code points is available at http://www.unicode.org/charts
]]>That makes this album a great test case to check out how well your MP3 or streaming service does with Unicode. As you can see below, iTunes and Rhapsody do well, but for some reason Amazon is giving me the Unicode question mark of death (my guess it's because the page specfies Verdana which doesn't have all the characters).
I haven't tested every music site, but you get the idea...
]]>
Not so long ago in the history of Web Development, the safest way to display non-Western text was the use of numeric entity codes. For instance, one course management system would convert Cyrillic text like Україна (Ukraine) to a series of numeric codes like:
Ч&#x;країла
This is fine for single words and small phrases, but it's bad for an entire page...especially if you want to edit it.
Fortunately, there is a quasi-fix for this if you need to replace numeric codes with real text. That is:
It's a little tedious, but since I couldn't quickly find a better tool for this, it is a decent stop gap. At least you won't have to re-type everything...
]]>One guideline in particular of interest is Guideline 1.4.5:
WCAG Guideline 1.4.5 Images of Text: If the technologies being used can achieve the visual presentation, text is used to convey information rather than images of text except for the following:
In other words, it is generally better to use CSS+actual text to present textual information, even when it is stylized. Unicode is especially important for doing this especially for characters beyond ASCII or Latin-1.
There are two reasons for this guideline. First is that if a screen reader has text available, the developer does not need to include any additional information such as an image ALT tag. The other is that text tends to be more flexible across devices. It particular, it can be zoomed without being rasterized (appearing jagged at large sizes) and it can have its format changed without information loss (say flipping from black text on white to white text on black - a format preferred by some users).
A second relevant guideline is:
WCAG Guideline 1.3.2: When the sequence in which content is presented affects its meaning, a correct reading sequence can be programmatically determined. (Level A)
An important concept for RTL (right to left languages) is ensuring that text remains in logical order so that characters are in their correct linear order, even if they are presented "backwards" from the more common LTR order. WCAG threrfore also recommends logical order and mentions the Unicode RLM (right-to-left marker) and LRM characters
A final i18n technology mandate of the WCAG 2.0 is the use of language tags.
WCAG Guideline 3.1.1: Language of Page: The default human language of each Web page can be programmatically determined.
In other words, use language tags to identify page language. This is especially important for screen readers which need to switch pronunciation engines between languages.
There have been several debates about the utility of WCAG 2.0, but I can rest assured that at least the needs of multilingual users have been considered.
]]>However, I am happy to report that I was able to create a HTML5+MathML file that works in Internet Explorer AND Firefox/Safari (with some Unicode thrown in).
As a reward, I think I will write a Unicode post today.
]]>Blocks added included Miao (script developed for Hmong/Miao languages), Merotic Heiroglyphic & Merotic Cursive (adaptation of Egyptian heirogphys from ancient Meroë in what is now Northern Sudan) and multiple scripts from India (Sora Sompeng, Chakma, Sharada, Takri).
Two new blocks for the Arabic script were also added - Arabic Mathematical Symbols and Arabic Extended -A. Extensions for the Sundanese and Meetei Mayak scripts were also added.
The Unicode Consortium has an index of which new characters have been added to different scripts.
]]>Yammer is a service similar to Twitter but with more tools suitable to a corporate environment. I posted some text with obscure phonetic characters and some Devanagari, and results were generally good.
This was done on a Mac via the Web site interface and via the desktop client using. It seemed low fuss enough that I suspect support is good in most configurations. Note that third party clients are always an unknown. For instance, although Twitter also has excellent Twitter support some of the third party viewers was pretty bad.
Most apps from Apple have good Unicode support and this is no different. My only concern here is font control. It looks like you can define new styles based on pre-existing formatted text, but can't really edit existing one.
One non-Unicode gripe is that some styles had small caps and I was not able to disable that. It may not be a show stopper in most docs, but not all scripts include small caps (or even distinguish capital/lower case).
I gather that the format generated is a form of XML (per Alan Quarterman) with HTML features and CSS....but the CSS is hard to directly edit. Whenever you leave the Western alphabet with few controls over font presentation, it's time to be nervous.
For the record, I am in love with Google Earth as a teaching tool. However, entering data was tricky.
The keyboard methods seem to work fine to enter text for items such as new locations, and so forth. However I had problems with using the Character Viewer (OS X 10.7). I would double click the symbol and nothing would happen ;(. Then again, it could be the new Character Viewer although it seems to be OK with Yammer.
In any case, this could be an issue if a user is trying to use a cute emoji symbol. Cut and paste from another document did appear to work.
]]>As with previous versions Character Viewer is activated in the Language & Text section of the System Preferences menu. See http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/keyboards/charpalosx.html for details.
By default, the Viewer only gives options for Symbols (e.g. "Arrows, Punctuation, Currency Symbols, Emoji"), I actually like how the symbols have been organized into semantic groups rather than by numeric block. However, the list does not include all the scripts I need to access.
Fear not though - the other block are availables. To view other blocks click the Gear icon, then select Customize List. This opens a pop-up window which provides a list of all available symbol lists, including Unicode, which is the entire list organized by Unicode block.
The basic mechanism is to select the character you want to highlight. In previous versions of this tool, there was an Insert button, but this has disappeared.
In this version, you need to do the following.
A feature that I am now using is the Favorites list, a place to list commonly used characters to insert. This puts everything in one list which you can order as needed.
You can add Favorites by selecting a character and either either clicking the Add to Favorites button or dragging it into the Favorites list.
Although I was a little confused by the new Lion Character Viewer, I actually think it was a good overhaul. It suits the average user who needs access to common symbols and emoji, but allows us more dedicated users access to what we need.
A final improvement worth noting is that the Font Variation feature is much more stable than in previous features. This is perfect for times when you need to debug a weird character/font combination.
]]>The image below shows roughly the glyphs covered (generally in black and white). There are more characters covered in the for-fee font DD Dingbats 2.0, but even these provide some interesting possibilities in terms of documentation and even fancy bullet lists (especially if combined with font embedding.
]]>
One of the conversion tasks was for us to add group e-mail addresses so we could share calendars among each other efficiently. But when I tried to copy and paste, I got a "not found error." Here is one of these addresses (altered for security reasons):
umg-sc.foo.staff@fuyu.ucal.psu.edu
Can you spot the problem (HINT: Try cutting and pasting into a text file).
Given up? The problem is the hyphen. In the right font, you will see that it's not just a hyphen (U+002D or ASCII #45), but actually the more elegant and slightly longer en dash which is actually U+2013 (not in ASCII). As many of you know, many databases are still sensitive to differences, so a hyphen is just not the same as an en dash. Theis means searching is a FAIL.
How did the en-dash get in there if it's outside of ASCII? My guess is that it's a result of an auto-correct feature from Word which makes some formatting tweaks to enhance visual appeal. One is to change plain hyphens into a slightly longer en-dash (more favored by typographers).
Another common change is to convert plain straight quotes (" at U+0022 or ASCII #34) to "Smart Quotes" like (“ at U+201C) and (” at U+201D). Copying HTML code attributes from Word can be similarly dangerous since HTML recognizes plain quotes, but NOT fancy double quotes. Most of the time, the change does nothing, but when it comes to interacting with some systems, the reformatting makes a difference in a very annoying way.
How to catch it? In some cases, you can change the font, but many fonts make the dash and en-dash appear identical (Arggh!). Which leaves the old standdy (test,test,test) plus some Unicode awareness (which is increasing among programmers).
]]>The table is organized by projected UCS code point number, but they are in various stages of the proposal process. Although dates of acceptance to a particular stage are posted, the target future version is not listed. Although many specifications look complete, the Unicode Consortium does warn that they are subject to change.
If you are interested in entire script blocks (particularly Ancient and lesser-known Indian scripts) coming to Unicode, you can go to the Proposed New Script page. The caveat that "things are subject to change" also applies here.
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