Re: OED
> >> I wrote to Oxford today to complain that there should be a > >> Macintosh version. Please do likewise, if you're a Mac user > >> and think that we deserve better! > > >Already did so, in fact, just hours after I posted, I got a response (via >snail mail) telling me they had no intention of doing so, as Mac users are a >"niche market." (Of course, the "niche" happens to be a much bigger subset >of their core market than of e.g. the business market, but what can we say?) Ok, looks like the phrase was "have only a minority share," a little less inflammatory than "niche market," but the "only" was suggestive. Apologies for misleading anyone with the quotes; I must have conflated it with something else. Patrick Rourke [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Greek Extended Characters
> Internet Explorer 5.5, running under Windows 95 -- > a non-Unicode system except for the UniScribe support > provided by IE -- can display not only Latin Y with grave > and with acute but also Greek Upsilon with varia and > with oxia. Yes, but . . . they don't look very good as combining characters, at least with Arial Unicode MS (and of course there are problems which the MS people on this list know about and I'll bet are working to fix which prevent the use of combining characters in Palatino Linotype altogether). Somewhere I have a whole table of what looks good and bad in each operating system (just for polytonic Greek), with several combinations of fonts and applications, and from what I remember, using certain fonts and certain applications, OS X, XFree86 4 + *nix, and various Windows versions can all *display* combining characters, with varying degrees of sophistication. But they don't look terribly good except in certain fonts and in certain apps. "Not terribly good" should be read as "often effectively unreadable" - if an acute accent *overlaps* a smooth aspirate (they should not quite touch, and the accent should be to the right of the aspirate) for instance, it is sometimes hard to distinguish that combination from the combination of a grave accent with a rough aspirate (that are wrongly overlapping). Obviously not the fault of the standard, and I'm sure David understands that, too (DP, feel free to take me to task on anything you disagree with), but the fault of implementers, many of whom simply don't realize that there are substantial communities of users in the West who need good Unicode support as much as users in the East do. > However, it might be worthwhile to submit the gist of this > letter to the UTC with a request to document that the 'missing' > combinations are expected to occur, and to alert font vendors > intending to support classical Greek to make sure that their fonts > supply these glyphs. If no one objects, I'll forward this discussion en mass to another list for classicists (at the Stoa Consortium) that might help with this, and has only a few overlaps with the subscription to this list. All the combinations that might be expected to occur would be hard to document, because there are epigraphic, paleolographical, and papyrus texts with very strange combinations. But they aren't all obscure: one "missing" combination, at least, is in Homer (I don't remember if the original poster mentioned that one or not). Please object before 5:15 pm EDST 1 May 2002 if you don't want your comments forwarded. Thanks, Patrick Rourke [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OED
>I for one will not buy the OED on CD until it's in a format I can use at >home on my Mac (OS X) - what I do at home is best done in OS X (though I >wish more applications had extended Greek support), what I do at the is >office best done in Windows XP. > I wrote to Oxford today to complain that there should be a > Macintosh version. Please do likewise, if you're a Mac user > and think that we deserve better! Already did so, in fact, just hours after I posted, I got a response (via snail mail) telling me they had no intention of doing so, as Mac users are a "niche market." (Of course, the "niche" happens to be a much bigger subset of their core market than of e.g. the business market, but what can we say?) I had tried to convince them to at least look into some kind of Unix interface, since that at least would satisfy OS X users as well as Linux users; but to no avail. If you're interested (or anyone else using a Mac is interested), I could retype the letter into an email and send to you offlist. Patrick Rourke [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Private Use Agreements and Unapproved Characters
Just to complete my thanks (now that I've received the digest), thanks too to Michael Everson for his comments, and John Hudson for the typographer's viewpoint on this suggestion. On the other subject that has been zipping about under this heading: I asked about ConScript only because it was the only existing registry of the type which I could find, and it seems like a good idea for a largish (hundreds or thousands) community of users. Thanks again, Patrick Rourke
Re: Private Use Agreements and Unapproved Characters
Thanks to everyone who has commented, especially John Cowan, Doug Ewell, and David Starner (I'm on the digest, and so apologize if I haven't thanked someone who has provided substantial comments). Thanks too to Mr. Overington, though with Mr. Kaplan I agree that this is a bit too much work to avoid the minor issue of overlapping PUA uses for my purposes; I was hoping merely to find an existing registry which might have some overlap with the user community I'm concerned with. I'm replying mainly to Mr. Ewell's comments, which are the kind of counter-arguments I was hoping to be able to consider. Sorry to be coy, but since I'm writing a proposal (not a Unicode proposal) to the authors of a couple of Unicode proposals for such a registry, and since the proposals which would be included in the registry are ones I did not have any hand in writing, I think it would be better for me to avoid too much precision until I've got the approval of the proposal writers (who would also be among the most important of my targeted users). > There's no reason it has to be that way. Proposed glyphs are posted on > the Unicode Web site months in advance of their "go live" date, even > before the beta period, largely for this reason. I'm sure Unicode-aware > type designers like John Hudson don't wait until a version of Unicode is > formally released before they start designing glyphs. True, but many scholarly communities are small enough that their needs might not be of interest to type designers with a wider targeted audience (like Mr. Hudson), and so depend largely upon small typographers, even amateurs to provide their type. In such cases, it would seem to me that a registry such as the one I'm suggesting would help to drive the transition. At any rate, I've already had two type designers who've done type for the community show interest in such a registry. > One important point to remember is that any use or proposed use of the > PUA, such as ConScript, is strictly up to private organizations, not the > Unicode Consortium. To be sure, ConScript is the domain of two guys who > are quite influential in Unicode, but they do not maintain ConScript in > any official capacity as representatives of Unicode. Fully aware of this. I'm thinking that this would be an improvement over the status quo, which is as David Starner suggested, the use of informal private encodings or escaped entities. > I would think you could simply use the version number of the Unicode > Standard. For example, the use of Tagalog would have been conformant to > this proposed PUA registry until Unicode version 3.2, at which time it > would have to be removed from the registry because of its introduction > into Unicode. This had not occurred to me! The only thing that would militate against this would be if additional characters were identified which had not yet been proposed and were proposed at a later date; that would require a new version number which would not be a Unicode point number, and so might be distinguished using a letter, etc. (I don't foresee this happening, but it's better to be safe than sorry, no?). > Conformance to this registry, especially over a period of time, is up to > the user community. The presence of a standard is no guarantee that it > will be followed, or even noticed. Excellent, this is the problem I was most concerned with. The target users for the registry would be a small number of electronic scholarly publishers in the community. The license for the fonts would strongly recommend that content providers using registry-based fonts would have to convert their character data to the Unicode-approved codepoints within say six months of release, and for the target publishers this wouldn't be a problem. If the distribution sites for the released fonts all included prominent links to the registry site, and the registry site provided information on the progress of the characters in the encoding process, this would I hope drive the adoption of later versions. So those outside the target user group would at least be made aware of the process by the license, and a mechanism would be in place to prevent the dead hand of the older versions of the registry from being quite so strong. > Suppose Old Persian Cuneiform is encoded in Patrick's PUA registry next > week, and that encoding achieves some popularity. Then suppose at some > later date it is encoded in Unicode, say version 4.1. This will > necessarily cause the encoding in Patrick's registry to be withdrawn, or > at least deprecated. I was thinking deprecated for two versions or two years, whichever was longer, and then ultimately withdrawn. > How many people will switch immediately to the > sanctioned Unicode encoding? How quickly will existing software and > data be converted? Probably not right away, and the chances for a > timely conversion are less if the private-use encoding is particularly > successful, whether
Polytonic Greek
> 2. Keyboards. Are there any Unicode keyboards/ > input methods for polytonic Greek? I don't know about Mac. But for Windows, Ralph Hancock's Antioch provides a Word 2000 keyboard for Windows, and Keyman and Multikey can provide Windows keyboards with Extended Greek capabilities (I think I have one for Multikey, and another listmember has been working on one for Keyman); also, I've used the SC UniPad editor (with a quick and dirty keyboard map I started and which is being further developed by James Naughton, intended to be semi-compatible with the betacode representation of polytonic Greek) with some success. I'll troll around some more with questions about Mac. Your other question I've answered offlist with a link to a draft document I've been working on, which is not ready for prime time. There are several easy to get TrueType fonts with such support, including Vusillus Old Face Italic (Ralph Hancock), Cardo (David J. Perry), Athena Unicode (Jeffrey Rusten), Code2000 (and I imagine Code2001 - I've been out of town for two weeks and haven't seen James Kass's new font mentioned in previous threads), Titus Cyberbit Basic (the Titus project only provides an exe-zipped version however - if I understood a correspondent correctly, this is because "Macintosh does not support Unicode." Well, there's a semantic issue there, which the list was kind enough to clear up for me), and two Windows-only TTF fonts (Windows only not technologically, but by license, or so I've assumed, because they are bundled with Windows products) Palatino Linotype (comes with Windows 2000) and Arial Unicode MS (comes with Office 2000). All but the Windows fonts are either freeware or shareware; there's a paidware version of the Vusillus font that includes roman style for about US$50 (part of the already mentioned Antioch package), and the price of Code2000 is very reasonable. The best *looking* fonts, though, are probably Minion Pro (which is definitely paidware, at the low 3 figures in US$, I believe) and the two Windows fonts (I happen to like the Palatino Linotype font, though I don't quite understand why the combining diacriticals aren't working in IE5 - rather than zero space characters, one gets an artifact character, and a particularly obnoxious one, too). All the shareware/freeware fonts I've mentioned I've tested myself under their evaluation terms, both on Windows 9x (98, SE, and ME) and RedHat 7 (with XFree86 4.0 and Mozilla M17), and most also with RedHat 6.2. (I've uninstalled the shareware fonts.) Minion Pro I have not tested at all; the two Windows fonts have been tested according to their licenses. I'd be interested to hear just how much luck you have with extended Greek in Acrobat, though. I haven't experimented with it that I remember (I don't like PDF except for print applications). Just remember to stick with one of the normalization forms (I use NFC, but then I do mostly web documents). Patrick Rourke (I'm on digest, so I apologize if someone else has answered this already) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Square and lozenge notes -- Musical Notation 3.1 -- Mensural notation
Quick tangential correction to that table that Patrick Andries supplied a link to: it seems to imply that the Greek accents were musical notation; they were not. For ancient Greek musical notation see M.L. West, *Ancient Greek Music*, pp. 254-276, especially the table on p. 256. Patrick Rourke - Original Message - From: Patrick Andries Sources : Dictionnaire de musique, Larousse & Encyclopaedia Universalis (scanned copy can be sent) http://www.nmc.vt.edu/staff/Ed/music/glossary/appendix/notation/Noteshapes.h tml (only provided for the neat table I'm not able to reproduced)
Re: Javascript Chart
In Windows ME, works in IE5.5 but not in Netscape 4.7 or Mozilla 2001021204. So I doubt it would work in say Linux (I haven't tested it, but might be able to later on). In IE5.5/ME, it works for me not only with different fontName values, but even with a list (e.g., var fontName="Arial Unicode MS,Lucida Sans Unicode" ). Of course, the list simply uses the first font that's available, regardless of whether the font contains any number of the characters being mapped (so if one has both fonts, and puts Lucida Sans Unicode first, code points that LSU doesn't provide glyphs for are displayed as artifact characters (mostly boxes)). Good job. Next time, though, I'd suggest using CSS rather than the deprecated element. Patrick Rourke [EMAIL PROTECTED] > I wrote a small HTML document that implements a quick-and-dirty chart for > Unicode, and I thought that someone on the Unicode list could find it > useful. > > The whole 17 planes may be reached, and you can see the three standard > encoding forms (not the schemes!) of each character. > > The document is formed by two HTML files and can be used off-line. Of > course, whether your browser shows the correct glyphs or just boxes depends > on the availability of fonts and Unicode support in your browser. > > I only tested it with Internet Explorer 4.0 on Windows NT (sp6), and I have > font Arial Unicode MS installed. > > I don't absolutely know (nor give warranties about) whether and how it works > on a different environment. > > If anyone is adventurous enough to wish to try it, find the two files > attached. You should put both in the same directory, and open > in your browser. > > Hint: red text is clickable and has some effect; black text is static. > > If you wish to read the sources, both files start with an explanatory > comment, but the rest is totally uncommented (yet). > > Have fun (I hope). > Marco > > > > >
Re: Help with Greek special casing
Don't know what the Unicode rules are, but the answer is no. The final sigma form is not used if the sigma is in a medial position in the word but at the end of the line (e.g., when it occurs at the point of hyphenation in a hyphenated word at line end). Also, there is no reason why a consonant other than rho should be followed by a combining diacritical mark, except say an underdot for use in papyrological or epigraphical texts. The upper case sigma is the same regardless of position; there is no differentiation between upper case final sigma and upper case initial/medial sigma. If a font uses the lunate sigma for the initial/medial form, it must use it for the final form as well, and vice versa. Hope that helps, Patrick Rourke [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Original Message - From: "Carl W. Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Unicode List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2001 10:30 PM Subject: Help with Greek special casing > From UTR 21. > > "If a mapping is marked by FINAL, use it when the character is not followed > by a cased character. > > It is final when followed by a hyphen or combining diacritical mark? Can > you have a final sigma in the middle of a word? > > Carl > >
Re: Inverted breve in Greek?
In fact, this is the (barely) preferred form of the circumflex, or perispomeni, for ancient Greek. Of four of the five major publishers of ancient Greek texts (I don't have any Budes available to check), Cambridge UP and Teubner use the tilde-like form in their type; Oxford UP and Harvard UP use the rounded form. Of other publishers whose books I have readily available, Macmillan, Oklahoma, American Book Company, and Aris and Phillips use the rounded form, as do a couple of older Cambridge UP books; a book from a prewar Berlin printer (A. Ebering) uses the tilde-like form; (the following use Greek type in books which are primarily in Latin type) California the rounded form, Methuen both, Manchester UP and Yale UP, the tilde; Belgian Royal Academy, the rounded form. For the dates: one Harvard UP book I checked was published in 1994, and an Oxford book in 1988. One Cambridge book was published in 1985; the Teubners I checked stretch from the 1880s to the 1970s. One cannot even talk about a "continental" or an "American" preference. Coding as u+0342, as Mr. Pietsch recommended, allows the printer to assign to the character whichever form it wishes, rather than coding as a tilde or an inverted breve, which forces the issue as to presentation. Patrick Rourke - Original Message - From: "Seán Ó Séaghdha" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Unicode List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 2:16 AM Subject: Inverted breve in Greek? Since there seem to be some people here who know about something about Greek diacritics, I'm hoping someone here will be able to help me. I know very little about Greek, as will probably become clear. I'm making a Unicode version of an ASCII representation of an etymological dictionary, which contains examples in many languages. Mostly the sequences used to represent non-ASCII characters are straightforward, but there's one I'm not sure about. It looks like an inverted breve and appears over Greek vowels, appearing above any accents. My question is - is this just a breve (and should I just encode it as 0311 COMBINING INVERTED BREVE) or is it an out of date version of something else (e.g. 0342 COMBINING GREEK PERISPOMENI)? This book was originally published in 1896. Examples (using inverted breve) \u1f60\u0311\u03bc\u03cc\u03c2 ὠ̑μός \u03c6\u03bb\u03bf\u03b9\u0311\u03c3\u03b2\u03bf\u03c2 φλοι̑σβος \u03b2\u03bf\u03c5\u0311\u03c2 βου̑ς \u03c6\u03b1\u0311\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 φα̑ρος \u03b2\u03c1\u03b9\u0311 βρι̑ \u03c6\u03c5\u0311\u03bb\u03bf\u03bd φυ̑λον `~:.,.:'^`~:.,.:'^`~:.,.:'^`~:.,.:'^`~:.,.:'^`~:.,.:'^`~:.,.:'^`~:.,.:'^`~ S e á n Ó S é a g h d h a [EMAIL PROTECTED] Atcota brothchán bithnert. [Tugann brachán bithneart.] Seanrá Sean-Ghaeilge.
Re: Macintosh OS8.6, OS9
Thanks to everyone who responded, especially Mr. Hagedorn; as it is precisely the Extended Greek, Basic Greek, and Combining diacriticals blocks that interest me, this was very important information. Patrick Rourke > Netscape, Internet Explorer and Icab (another browser for the MacOs) > use UTF8 (Internet Explorer and Icab via the TEC) > > In macOs 9.1 with an apllication which supports the Multilingual Text > Engine you can even use a windows true type font like cyberbit > without converting it to Macintosh format.
Re: Greek questions, on- and off-topic
Here's a listing of the Unicode names (which are the modern Greek names, I believe) for diacriticals in the Extended Greek range and the analogous English *common* names of the Greek accents: acute = oxia grave = varia circumflex = perispomeni iota subscript = ypogegrammeni smooth breathing = psili rough breathing = dasia diaresis = dialytika "Tonos" is the Greek word for accent. The letters with "tonos" in the basic Greek block are called that because all accented Greek characters in modern Greek script use the same accent - and that is the acute. The following diacriticals are not used in typeset Greek text, but only in dictionaries and other books where learners need to be given the length of alpha, iota, and epsilon (omicron and epsilon are of course always short; and omega and eta are of course always long, so one would never need the macron or breve over the other four vowels, even in dictionary listings): macron = macron vrachy = breve The basic Greek block also includes letters that are not used in Classical Attic (Stigma, Digamma, Qoppa, Sampi, Yot), except that some are used as numerals, and a number of characters that are only used in Coptic (post-hieroglyphic Egyptian: Dei, Shei, Fei, Khei, Hori, Shima) and are derived from the demotic Egyptian script. Also do not use the "symbol" versions of Greek letters. Ano teleia is the semicolon (a raised dot). I imagine that the capitals with diaresis are there for text that's in all capitals but is accented. Note that ancient, biblical and Byzantine Greek all use the polytonic version of the script, and modern Greek uses the monotonic (in effect, only uses the acute accent). I've been working for some time on an online resource for using Unicode with ancient Greek, but it's not yet in finished form. It is VERY important to follow Marco Cimarosti's suggestion to look at the normalization forms chart. Patrick Rourke [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Original Message - From: "Marco Cimarosti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Unicode List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2001 3:10 AM Subject: RE: Greek questions, on- and off-topic > > My Greek textbook has acute, grave, and circumflex (called by > > those names), > > but I'm not sure what these correspond to in the Greek and > > Greek Extended > > blocks (there seem to be many more diacriticals than those). > > Is there an on-line guide somewhere? > > There are in fact other diacritics used in Greek in addition to the three > accents: > > - Dieresis or dialytica (also used in modern spelling) > - Spiritus asper (romanized with an "h") and spiritus levis > - Subscript iota (to show an unpronounced etymological "i") > - Macron and breve (only used in grammar books and dictionaries) > - Apostrophe (admitting it can be called a diacritic) > - and something else that I am forgetting, probably... > > To know which Unicode code points should be used for these diacritics, the > handiest thing is to look up the canonical decompositions in the > UnicodeData.txt database, both in the basic Greek block (U+03xx) and in the > extended block (U+1Fxx). The canonical decomposition field is the data just > after the 5th semicolon on each line. > > _ Marco > >
Re: Transcriptions of "Unicode"
He didn't actually say it: someone joked at a dinner or fundraiser that Dan Quayle had felt guilty that he hadn't studied his Latin upon his visit to Latin America, and the press picked it up as though it were a true report of Quayle's own words. What it says of the man that millions of people believed him capable of saying it, I leave others to decide. I suspect that he was nominated because he reminded GHWB of someone. Patrick Rourke [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Original Message - From: "Tex Texin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Unicode List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, January 15, 2001 5:27 PM Subject: Re: Transcriptions of "Unicode" > Wasn't it Dan Quayle who said they speak Latin in Latin America? > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > > > > > 1. When I learned Latin in the U.S. in the 1960s, we were taught a > > > > > reconstructed Roman pronunciation. > > > > > > Latin is still spoken in Rome, at the Vatican. > > > > > > So there is a Roman pronunciation even today... (; > > > > > > Just kidding... although what I say is true... > > > > > > Alain > > > > How about a weekly radio news broadcast in Latin? > > > > http://www.yle.fi/ylenykko/nuntii.html (in Finnish :-) > > http://www.yle.fi/fbc/latini/ (in Latin) > > http://www.yle.fi/fbc/latini/summary.html (in English) > > -- > According to Murphy, nothing goes according to Hoyle. > -- > Tex Texin Director, International Business > mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +1-781-280-4271 Fax:+1-781-280-4655 > Progress Software Corp.14 Oak Park, Bedford, MA 01730 > > http://www.Progress.com#1 Embedded Database > > Globalization Program > http://www.Progress.com/partners/globalization.htm > -- - >
