Comprehensive site on fonts, scripts and writing systems

One of the organisations that I follow the work of is the Non Roman Scripts Initiative (NRSI) of SIL. Getting Bibles into all the languages of the world that need them often means getting the Bible into all the writing systems of those languages, and the people at NRSI do a lot of work on getting complex scripts to work on modern technology.

They've recently launched their ScriptSource website. There's actually been something there for a few years, but only a few pages. However I can now see why it took so long to launch it properly - there's so much there - 181 scripts, nearly 7000 languages, 100,000 Unicode symbols (including the snowman). It's not just a site for information though, they invite contributions and advertise software needs.

I'm impressed.

Unicode isn't so bad

This afternoon I produced a file with this in it:

šovský

I was filled with dread because I knew it meant I had to delve into Unicode which I don't feel I understand enough. However with a bit of digging, and this article on Python and Unicode I got there without too much trouble. I had to tweak my code as different original sources were in different formats, but I got there in the end.

"Jesus in my language" launches

A new part of one of our websites has launched - Jesus in my language. It has a selection of verses from Mark's gospel in various languages. I've had a small involvement in this at the start, sorting out some of the Unicode issues.

Although Unicode is the way forward when it comes to working in the languages of the world, a lot of the stuff in the archives isn't in Unicode, as it was worked on before Unicode was available, or the appropriate tools were available in Unicode. Instead custom fonts were created. Sometimes the archives contained these fonts, and sometimes they didn't so that was more of a challenge. Ventura Publisher was the favoured tool for typesetting the Bible in those days, and so sometimes the clues as to what the characters are is in Ventura format files.

In precomputer days sometimes custom fonts were obtained by filing off parts of some of the letters to get the character required!

Unicode poster

We've just put up a massive Unicode poster at work. It's got all of the Basic Multilingual Plane. I think it looks great. Call me strange.

tags: unicode

Internationalisation and localisation

My recent need to research Unicode has sent me to investigate Internationalisation and localisation. Today I came across wordforge.org which aims to help with Internationalisation and localisation so that minority languages aren't "digitally endangered" as they put it.

tags: i18n
l10n

Getting round lack of font support on browsers

Whilst working on a Unicode-related project someone told me about sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). It's a way of getting custom fonts displayed on web pages which degrades gracefully if a Flash viewer isn't available. However it's not really for body text, so we won't be using it. It looks really useful in other circumstances though.

tags: fonts
flash

So you're having trouble with a Unicode document?

You open a Unicode document and all you get is:

Here is a simple and beautiful (due to the site I link to, not to my prose) solution:

• In Word 2003 (sorry, I don't know if it works in other versions), put the cursor after one of the characters and press Alt-X.
• You should then get a four digit number, like 12E8.
• Go to decodeunicode.org and run your mouse over the line of colons near the top of the page.
  

• What you're looking for it to say a range of numbers after the "U+" that includes the four digit code you found above. Then you may get a link to a font you can download to display that text.
  

tags: unicode

The Joy of Unicode

I've started work on a project to put samples from the Bible in many languages on our Vision 2025 website. So I've got to get to grips with some Unicode issues. Working out what browsers will display what you want is a bit of a minefield. It's also a question of which fonts your website visitors have installed, which partly depends on which Microsoft products they have installed, which you can't autodetect.

The wisdom seems to also be that people won't install fonts just to read something, though we'll offer them that choice.

Apache Server Side Include (SSI) files only import ASCII. I think someone needs to read Joel on Software The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

tags: unicode
Bible