Re: Handling Aboriginal Languages

Actually Unicode isn't about languages so much as charcters within 
written standards for the languages.  A language is "Unicode ready" 
if Unicode has all the characters used in its writing system. Based 
on brief examination on the Web site, it seems possible that Tlicho 
is.

If you are on a Mac, you can use the Extended keyboard to generate 
the characters directly within the HTML file. Note that there is one 
key code to generate the bar and another to generate the hook 
(technically "Ogonek" and NOT "Cedilla").
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codemacext.html

If you are on Windows, you may need to use the Character Map and 
insert the exotic characters
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/charmap.html

You may also want to investigate Polish keyboards (since Polish has 
barred L and A/O/E Ogonek), but you may still have troubles with I 
and U ogonek.

In terms of the Web, the most important thing is to specify UTF-8 
character endoding in the head. For HTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
...
<head>

Your Web site is currently set to ISO-8859-1 which will never work 
with Tlicho. The way around this depends on what tool you are using 
to generate your Web pages.  Some settings for major editors are 
listed here
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/web/tips/

Hope this helps get you started.

Elizabeth Pyatt


FYI - If you do offer a font, it is a good idea to make sure it 
Unicode friendly. That is, the barred l should be in the slot 
reserved for Unicode barred l.


>Hello All,
>
>As a web developer in Canada, I've had to deal with both of our
>official languages: French and English. Today I've been given a new
>challenge as one of our clients wants to develop a site in some
>Aboriginal languages (Tlicho [1] for e.g.).
>
>Now, traditionally I just do everything in utf-8 and send that across
>the wire. However, with this language, are there even unicode
>codepoints for it? If so, how would i do the data entry? There are
>fonts available for the language so i could "cheat" and go that route
>as well.
>
>Does anyone have any advice on what direction I should follow?
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>-Brian Cassidy (brian.cassidy@gmail.com)
>
>[1] http://www.tlicho.ca/


-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D.
Instructional Designer
Education Technology Services, TLT/ITS
Penn State University
ejp10@psu.edu, (814) 865-0805 or (814) 865-2030 (Main Office)

210 Rider Building  (formerly Rider II)
227 W. Beaver Avenue
State College, PA   16801-4819
http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/psu
http://tlt.psu.edu

Received on Wednesday, 14 January 2009 19:14:17 UTC