Andrew, Belated thanks for this message. One big gap re Unicode that has come up in discussions elsewhere, as you know, is in publishing software. That is, while most software used on the home/personal, office, and public access levels is Unicode aware, and hence able to handle the character needs of most languages (with the right fonts), most publishing software is not yet. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) This poses problems for authors taking scripts in languages that use extended characters or certain non-Latin scripts to publication. One's good manuscript in a Unicode font may require reqorking to permit the publisher to deal with the special character needs.
That covers a lot of African languages (as well as a great many indigenous languages on other continents of course, though old non- Unicode solutions exist for most major non-Western languages). I'd be interested in anyone's experience in this regard with African languages. I'm presently in communication with an effort to prepare Hausa educational materials for publication and I hope to follow their progress with the publishers to understand some of the dynamics better. Don Osborn Bisharat.net --- In [email protected], Andrew Cunningham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hopefully any African organization or government will > do its homework and do some reasearch on what is > already encoded in Unicode. > > The more reports I read, the more I think that there > is a need for basic Unicode awareness raising. I > wonder how much of this is a lack of awareness of teh > Unicode character model and the role of combining > daicritics. > > There are very few characters that aren't included in > Unicode, and there are a number of proposals in the > pipeline to fill most of those gaps. > > Andrew > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. > http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater? Donate or volunteer in the arts today at Network for Good! http://us.click.yahoo.com/pkgkPB/SOnJAA/Zx0JAA/TpIolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AfricanLanguages/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
