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 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: svg-developers-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ----Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: svg-developers-dig...@yahoogroups.com svg-developers-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: svg-developers-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
