Recently in By Script Category

I was checking the font repositories and found some new fonts that might be of interest to the linguistics/medieval/math crowd. But before that, I would like to define a new term LGC = Latin/Greek/Cyrillic font which refers to any font which includes the Latin, Latin-A, Cyrillic and Greek and a few math symbols. So many fonts include all three blocks, that's a handy acronym for me.

One caveat is that Basic LGC fonts don't necessarily include ALL LGC characters. For instance a font like Verdana may be missing IPA extensions, Cyrillic extensions and Greek extensions. The good news is that more fonts including the special characters are becoming available, and we're getting freeware large fonts to fill in typographical needs like small caps and narrow characters.

• Arev Sans - A sans serif font with excellent LGC coverage including Latin/Greek/Cyrililc extensions, a good inventory of math symbols and other symbols/punctuation.
• Linux Libertine - A family of OTF fonts with separate fonts for bold, italics, small caps. Good LGC coverage. It's also good to have a small caps font for Greek and Cyrillic, but it seems to be missing some of the phonetic characters.
• Marin Font - This font is notable for being a little narrower than others which is a nice change and has glyphs for the Cherokee block and the Canadian Aboriginal Syllables. It also includes a separate Small Caps font.
• Roman Cyrillic Std, BukyVede, KlimentStd from Kodeks German Medieval Slavicists Server - Bukyvede in particular includes a lot of historical Cyrillic characters and includes the Glagoltic characters. Kliment and Roman Cyrillic are LGC fonts which include other variations of the Glagoltic block. Latin and Greek are also included
• Quivira - I discussed this a few entries ago, but to repeat: Big font. Lots of scripts including LGC, Coptic, Armenian, Hebrew, Georgian, Thai, Baybayin, Runic, Thai, Braille, some Indic...
• Sophia Nubian - a new Coptic and Nubian script font from SIL with Keyman keyboard utility (Windows). A Mac Coptic Unicode Keyboard is also available.

I should mention that SIL is an excellent source of freeware fonts for undersupported scripts. Here's a list of the SIL fonts.

There are always more fonts out there so I recommend a periodic check of Gallery of Unicode Fonts and Alan Wood's Font list periodically. You never know what you might find.

A while ago, I wrote about the complexity of specifying a language code for Cantonese, the form of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong. As many East Asian specialists know, Cantonese is so distinct from standard Mandarin Chinese (Beijing) that Western universities offer separate Cantonese language classes.

To further complicate the situation I also recently learned that there is also HKSCS or the "Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set" which is a block of Chinese hanzi characters used just on Hong Kong. I did decide to gather a few links for myself, in case the topic ever comes up. Here is what I found.

• Microsoft HKSCS Support Page
• HKSCS Information (Hong Kong Government)
• HKSCS Input Software (Windows?)
• Yale Chinese Mac (scroll to "Canjie")
• Hewlett Packard HKSCS Support and Locales
• Common Chinese Language Interface (Government of Hong Kong)
• Michael Kapalan: The Trouble with HKSCS
• big5 HKSCS Support in Camino browser for Mac

Some Basic Notes

1. Microsoft does incorporate HKSCS support into Windows in principle, but you may need to download the appropriate plugins, especially for XP and earlier versions of Windows. See the first few links above for details. Full support may also depend on implementation in other software packages.

2. Recent versions of Mac include Changjie and Janyie option in the Traditional Chinese input utilities. See the Yale Chinese Mac page above for details. Full support may also depend on implementation in other software packages.

3. HKSCS comes in a 2001 and a 2004 version. It is also tied to both Uniicode (UCS) and Big5 encoding (Traditional Chinese, Taiwan) even though the rest of China mostly uses Simplified Chinese.

4. Some recent discussions on the Unicode list (ca. Nov 2008) seemed to indicate that HKSCS was not as wide-spread as it could be, but it does appear that the major vendors are making initial steps.

While I am not an expert on the technical aspects of HKSCS, I do think it's interesting that there continues to be a "Hong Kong" issue even though it's been a part of China for over 10 years. Several centuries of a separate colonial heritage has allowed a Cantonese written standard to more fully emerge than it might otherwise have happened.

I've created a quick Runes on the Web tutorial on this blog at http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/blogs/gotunicode/charts/runes.html

Enjoy!