From: James Kass (thunder-bird@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Dec 07 2007 - 18:06:54 CST
John Hudson asked,
> Does Vai text typically make use of any characters outside the Vai block,
> e.g. punctuation? If one were building a Vai font, what characters would
> be deemed important to include that do not belong to the Vai block?
digits 0-9
full stop
comma
left/right parenthesis
hyphen
The above are all used in the Unicode version of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in Vai.
Although Vai has Vai-specific digits encoded, apparently Vai users
don't use them, preferring Western digits. It is said that some
modern printers use European punctuation and that some use the
Vai-specific punctuation.
To speculate, I'd guess that the Vai people probably use the occasional
currency symbols. I haven't any information concerning quotes.
Making a font for Vai is challenging. There are so many glyph variants
from which to choose, including historic/obsolete forms. Kudos to
Michael Everson and Jason Glavy for the quality of their work on
the Vai proposal and chart font.
To get an example of running Vai Unicode text, I downloaded the
U.D.H.R. in Unicode Vai in PDF format and then copy/pasted into
a plain text editor.
Best regards,
James Kass
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Dec 07 2007 - 18:33:02 CST