In a message dated 2/27/99 7:05:20 PM, Janice writes:
<< y with circumflex accent >>
I was going to respond to this the first round, but when I saw the discussion
was discussing the ASCII codes in MS DOS/Windows, I refrained. I have a
Macintosh and the various vowels and consonants with diacritical marks are
accomplished with a preceding OPTION-something prior to the letter or just
OPTION-consonant to get the çedilla.
HOWEVER: These letter combinations are coded to result in a character already
assigned to the character set for the language/family in use in use. Because
there are other European languages (that haven't been marginalised) with
acute, grave and circumflex vowels (some subset of a, e, i, o, u), and they
have a large published literature, these 'glyphs' are included among the 255
or so in the ASCII set. I was hoping, that the key-stroke combinations were
actually creating the glyph on the fly, such that I could put a circumflex on
a 'q' or tilde on a 'd' ... whatever struck by graphic fancy. Then the
Welsh
w+^ and y+^ (as I have seen it done in some newsgroups) could be created at
will, too.
When I was in Wales summer before last, there were for sale at the Eisteddfod
floppy discs of some standard TT or PS (Microsoft True Type or Adobe
PostScript) fonts that had been internally re-engineered, replacing characters
not likely to be in use much with the w and y variants, lower and upper case.
Having them installed on one's own drive would allow the bitmap screen and
vector printer fonts to appear. The recipient or reader, on another computer
would have to have the same re-engineered font installed to be able to see
these characters. That takes a bit of doing/sharing/purchasing in the
population AND IT WOULD HAVE TO BE DONE FOR EVERY TYPEFACE FAMILY. Needless to
say, if you wanted anything other than Times Roman or Helvetica (maybe Courier
was included, but can you imagine spending thousands on a computer and making
it look like a TYPEWRITER?) you were out of luck.
On web pages, for headlines a word/letter could be created in a vector-draw
program then saved as a JPG or GIF graphic instead of text. This would not be
practical for a whole body of prose: the file would be way too large, slow to
download, and the reader couldn't enlarge it with PREFERENCES.
As it happens, I have a font-tweaking program called Fontographer which I
purchased for this very purpose: re-engineering a glyph or four and saving a
version of the resultant typeface as Garamond-C(ymraeg) or Delphian-C or
Lucida-C. For my narrow but ever widening circle of Welsh e-correspondents, I
would attach a copy of the font in use to any document I sent them. They
would then install the font, open the application to read the document, and it
would appear as I sent it.
Sorry -- I didn't intend to get nerdy about all this, but the problem isn't
insoluble within a small in-feeding population. It is only when broadcasting
the literature that there is the problem. Soon after Gutenberg, Welsh
publishers soon realised that if they were going to have their own literature
published, some compromises were going to have to be made to their heretofore
WYSIWYG spelling: one character/one sound. Sure they could have come up with
a brand new letter for phonemes 'dd' or 'll' or 'rh' of
'ng' and so on, but
they would never get their stuff published as typesetters would have to have a
set just for that one language, and the market didn't warrant it. So, we have
the double letters/phoneme, and if you have ever done crossword puzzles you
know these go in ONE box. I find it hardest to remember these doubles when I
am trying to alphabetise something. NG doesn't come after N
OK, I'll stop. I hope this isn't considered too far off topic, but it does
concern the language of the people we are researching, and that makes it
relevant, I should think.
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