From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Mon Jul 04 2005 - 20:39:20 CDT
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
On
> Behalf Of Donald Z. Osborn
> I'm wondering
> what can be said generally about the use of the Unicode standard by
font
> developers/companies who focus on serving the academic community and
> especially linguists.
I'm not sure how many developers can be so characterized, but some I'm
aware of (e.g. SIL, Bigelow & Holmes (Lucida), Monotype/ITC (Stone),
Linguist's Software) are developing for Unicode, and some of them have
been doing so for several years.
> I'm looking mainly at the other side of the equation -
linguists/academics
> and their use of Unicode
Ah, now this is a slightly different story. My impression is that
transition to Unicode among linguists is very mixed. There appears to be
a fairly good level of awareness of Unicode, but also a fair measure of
uncertainty about what's involved in working with Unicode -- and whether
any implementations exist that do what they need. Linguists are a very
mixed bag. Some need a modest selection of phonetic symbols, others
needs that plus several combining marks in combination, yet others need
a modest selection of base-mark combinations for transliterations, and
yet others need this or that non-Roman script - some of which are not
yet in Unicode. Some have been using Unicode for a while; others have
been able to but are still using legacy encodings either due to inertia
or to uncertainty; others have needed capabilities that are available
but not yet widely so; for some, Unicode-based solutions don't yet exist
(for some, because the characters they need are not yet in Unicode).
Peter Constable
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