Recently in Coptic Category

African languages were in the news Unicode wise because data from a number of African languages was added to the latest version of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (UCDL). The hope is that this repository will make it easier to provide African-language software implementations (e.g. a Windows implementation in Hausa) and data presentations (e.g. a calendar in Afar).

If you are interested in implementing content in African languages, there are a number of resources available depending on what your goals are:

African Computing

These pages cover internationalization of African languages.

• Open Road African Language Guide
• African Network for Localisation - technical information and efforts to provide utilities for different languages
• PanAfrican Localisation project
• Bisharat Net - very technical information

African Languages

• UCLA AFLANG Directory
• Languages of South Africa
• Cornell African Writing Systems
• Penn Languages of Africa Resources

And lastly, the Penn State Computing with Resources site maintains several informational pages on working with text in multiple languages from Africa.

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.

I was trying to learn more about how the Coptic alphabet interacted with Unicode, and although each and every script has it's own story, I was surprised at how tricky Coptic is with respect to Unicode. Coptic is a left-to-right alphabet with minimal spacing issues - much like the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets. If you can get Gothic online, Coptic should be easy right? Not necessarily...

Some Things You Should Know About Coptic and Unicode

Such as...

1. There is an old Coptic block and a new Coptic block

You may already know that the Coptic alphabet is an adaptation of the Greek alphabet as used in late Ptolomeic, Roman Egypt. I think most Unicode aficionados know that there is an old Coptic block (containing just the letters adapted from Demotic Egyption script), and a new Coptic block (everything).

At one point the Unicode community was treating Coptic as a variant of the Greek alphabet with a few extra letters, but later it was decided to separate Greek and Coptic completely, so the new block was created in just the past few years.

2. The old Coptic block didn't go away

As far as I can tell, the Demotic characters were not assigned new numbers, but were left as part of the Greek block. A complete Coptic alphabet is pulling from both blocks.

This was kind of a surprise since many Coptic charts just show the new block and miss the Demotic letters altogether.

3. New Coptic fonts and utilities are available

The new Coptic block is old enough for the academic and other developers to catch up. Here's my current list. By the way, I also recommend Quivira and MPH2B Damase as general purpose linguistic fonts - they do cover a lot of blocks.

Coptic Fonts

The following freeware fonts are available for both Windows and Mac:

• New Athena Unicode 3.3+ (Greek Keys)
  Note: If you have older versions of these fonts, you may need to uninstall the older versions
• MPH2B Damase (includes many scripts)
• Coptic Unicode Fonts - multiple fonts. Maintained by Moheb Mekhaiel.
• Quivira (includes many scripts)

Coptic Computing and Keyboards

• Berkeley Center for the Tebtunis Papyri (bottom of page) - Mac and Windows
• Logos Windows Keyboards for Ancient Languages - see information at Coptic for Windows XP

4. Browsers generally choke on Coptic (except Firefox 3 and Safari)

I uploaded my fonts, and checked my new chart on Safari (which is fine, but not always a Unicode superstar in my opinion). Everything worked there, but when I checked my chart in Firefox 2, all I got were the Unicode question marks of death (Whoa)

The same also happened in IE 7 and Opera. Not a pleasant surprise. For the record, I was able to get Opera and Firefox 2 (Windows) to display Coptic if I made a font with Coptic the generic default (hence my recommendation for Quivira). I was not able to get either Firefox 2 for Mac or IE 7 to display Coptic (and I did see some other forum messages indicating similar issues).

The good news is that the Coptic did encourage me to upgrade to Firefox 3, and there everything is fine - no font tweaks needed.

As I said earlier I am mystified by this because Coptic is not particularly unusual as far as Unicode blocks go. But it is working in some browsers now.

So that was my adventure with Coptic. Someday I hope I may get to use it in a real textual or linguistic application, but at least I know that I was able to update to Firefox 3 and not lose all of my other plugins!