On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 03:28 -0400, William J Poser wrote: > This font looks like it has a custom encoding. I used pfaedit > to inspect the font - it will show you what glyph is at what > codepoint. How to work with it depends on what you want to do. > If you are accustomed to working with Unicode tools, you could > re-encode the font to Unicode using pfaedit or some other > tool. > > If you want to use it in OpenOffice.org Writer, install the font > following the instructions at: > http://billposer.org/Linguistics/Computation/XFonts.html. Then, after > starting up Writer, select the font and type away. > When you type "a" you will get the glyph at codepoint 0x61 and so forth. > I've put an image at: http://billposer.org/Hidden/akk.jpg showing > OO Writer displaying the result of typing a-z. Of course, to use this > font extensively you'll probably want to create a keyboard mapping or > some other input mechanism.
Apparently Cuneiform is available in Unicode. See
www.unicode.org/charts and specifically under the heading Ancient
Scripts.
You can indeed convert your existing fonts to Unicode by using pfaedit
(or now called FontForge) by simply cutting and pasting the glyphs to
the correct index. Cuneiform glyphs start at 0x12000.
You can then install the font as Bill describes.
In order to write with the new font, you can create a keyboard layout
that mimics the existing layout you are using.
If you use Ubuntu Linux, you need to create a keyboard layout file
in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/ for Akkadian.
The format of the file is quite simplistic.
Let's see the Khmer file, /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/kh:
// keys: `1234567890-=\
key <TLDE> { [ guillemotleft, guillemotright ] };
key <AE01> { [ 0x10017e1, exclam ] };
key <AE02> { [ 0x10017e2, 0x10017d7 ] };
key <AE03> { [ 0x10017e3, quotedbl ] };
key <AE04> { [ 0x10017e4, 0x10017db ] };
key <AE05> { [ 0x10017e5, percent ] };
The first column (key) shows the scan code of each key. It covers each
row on the physical keyboard. If you start of the Khmer file, you do not
need to figure out those scan codes.
Then, the first column in the brackets corresponds to the unicode value
of the glyph that will appear when you press the key. The second column
is the glyph that appears when you press Shift+<key>. You may want to
add a third and fourth column (if required) for Alt+<key> and Alt+Shift
+<key>.
Once you save the file, follow the instructions at
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edgy#How_to_add_keyboard_layouts_for_other_languages
to add Akkadian.
The important benefit of this is that the documents you will be writing
will follow the Unicode standard. This is cool.
Hope this helps,
Simos - http://simos.info/blog/
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