Hello,
I currently am working, with Patrick Andries from the UNICODE
consortium on submitting a request for UNICODE support for Mandombe
script.
I would want to know if anything can be done (an how this can be done)
to include this support in OpenOffice.Org.
Mandombe is currently used in DRC, Congo, Angola, Gabon, Botswana,
Nigeria, Liberia ... by a growing community.
However, most people in this community don't hav access to IT, because
of lack of langual representitivity.
We are therefore working on including support for Mandombe and native
languages trough this scripts (which has support for tonal languages)
in a custom linux distribution.
We would like to include OpenOffice in this distribution since it is
probably the best microsoft concurrent in opensource/free community.
Our goal is to provide populations with an alternative to microsoft
threat which is growing dangerous in these countries: well, at this
time microsoft is willing to touch african countries too, and therefore
planning to integrate native languages into next windows oses.
Of course, as you may know, African countries don't have legal
background to contain microsoft's politics yet. Therefore prevailing of
opensource might save people some disagreements and contribute to
generating initiative in IT.
Basically, there now is an opentype font for mandombe. However,
mostfeatures don't seem to work with openoffice (as with most software
though) and that is the part we would need help for.
The font itself is working under Adobe creative suite and was generated
with fontlab 4.6.
At this time we don't know about any other software that can corretcly
display the features of the font, which are mostly ligatures.
eg: b + a -> ba (ba is a ligature of b and a).
We are currently working on that matter with pango too and it would be
great if we could distribute something good by the beginning of the
next year.
Please feel free to contact me by email.
Regards,
Simon.
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