Thanks JC,
The page renders very nicely in Opera as well.
I had looked at this link before when you answered a question I asked here
about displaying Unicode in SVG, and have a note to myself to study it more
carefully when time lets me. But it is good to share and recast that
information more broadly since I suspect I am not alone in my naivete.
I wonder if your methods could be applied to the Wikipedia entry at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhala_language to make the characters there
display properly.
I have some students working on a browser-based font-design engine and have
been interested in a sort of grammar of the geometry of non-western fonts: is
there, for example, a class of sub-glyphs that can predict the way an
orthography's characters are formed? The Roman alphabet seems to be
characterizable by a very few graphical primitives { | , /, \ , o, c, - and
hump*) glued together, so that its "graphemic primitive set" would tend to
suggest a fairly rectilinear font designer (which indeed is the case,
apparently, for the two major font design products on the market). My sense is
that, for other alphabets, syllabaries and logographies, the geometry of font
design is in many cases likely to be very non-rectilinear. My completely
ignorant view of Sinhala** and my recent quick lesson in Arabic*** from a
colleague would tend to confirm this suspicion.
cheers
David
* hump = ( n - | ) = ( u - | ) and m = ( 2*hump + | )
**I have had some Sinhala speaking students over the years, and recall finding
out that its way of doing children's Pig Latin, like Argentinian Spanish, is
very different from English. A contrastive study of multilingual Pig Latin
would be great fun to read!
***Arabic seems to have some fascinating relaxations of geometry based on
context -- the sort of things that in the acoustic realm are called
morphophonemic conditioning. (Is there such a thing as morphographemic
conditioning?) Baseline and kerning rules are often suspended and the
permissible deviations from linearity are quite striking.
- Original Message -
From: JC Ahangama
To: svg-developers@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, November 05, 2010 11:20 PM
Subject: [svg-developers] A less known side of SVG
There is a great utility SVG provides for a fifth of the population of the
planet (if they care to use it). It is not magical graphics but OpenType
feature support. It resurrects Indic Complex Scripts from the hole they fell
into due to complexities of Unicode.
The following is a link to a (sample) WordPress blog written entirely in
transliterated Sinhala displayed using a downloadable smartfont that shows
the transliteration back in the Sinhala script. (Copy the text and paste it
to Notepad to understand)
Use Firefox, Safari, Lunascape or Google Arora:
http://www.ahangama.com/
The pages depend on support for @font-family to download a WOFF font and the
'text-rendering' instruction.
Sinhala is the language spoken in Sri Lanka. It is an Indic language like
Devanagari.
JC
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