Re: Romanized Singhala - Think about it again

Philippe, ask your friends why ordinary people Anglicize if Unicode Sinhala
is so great. See just one of many community forums: http://elakiri.com

I know you do not care about a language of a 15 milllion people, but it
matters to them.

On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 10:46 PM, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> You are alone to think that. Users of the Sinhalese edition of
> Wikipedia do not need your hack or even webfonts to use the website.
> It only uses standard Unicode, with very common web browsers. And it
> works as is.
> For users that are not preequiped with the necessary fonts and
> browsers, Wikipedia indicates this vey useful site:
> http://www.siyabas.lk/sinhala_how_to_install_in_english.html

I have two guys here in the US that asked me to help get rid of Unicode
Sinhala that I helped them install from that 'very useful site'. Copies of
this message goes to them. Actually, you do not need their special
installation if you have Windows 7. Windows XP needs update of Uniscribe,
and Vista too. Their installation programs are faulty and interferes with
your OS settings.

>
>
> This solves the problem at least for older version of Windows or old
> distributions of Linux (now all popular distributions support
> Sinhalese). No web fonts are even necessary (WOFT works only in
> Windows but not in older versions of Windows with old versions of IE).
>
You mean WEFT? Now TTF (OTF) are compressed into WOFF. I see that Microsoft
is finally supporting it.(At least my font downloads, or may be it picks up
the font in my computer? Now I am confused)

>
> Everything is covered : working with TrueType and OpenType, adding an
> IME if needed. And then navigating on standard Sinhalese websites
> encoded with Unicode.
>

Philippe, try making a web page with Unicode Sinhala.

>
> Note that for version of Windows with older versions than IE6 there is
> no support only because these older versions did not have the
> necessary minimum support for complex scripts. The alternative is to
> use another browser such as Firefox which uses its own independant
> renderer that does not depend on Windows Uniscribe support. But these
> users are now extremely rare. Almost everyone now uses at least XP for
> Windows (Windows 95/98 are definitely dead), or uses a Mac, or a
> smartphone, or another browser (such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera).
>
I agree.

>
> Nobody except you support your tricks and hacks. You come really too
> late truing to solve a problem that no longer exists as it has been
> solved since long for Sinhalese.
>
Mine is a comprehensive solution. It is a transliteration. Ask users that
compared the two. Find ordinary Singhalese. They use Unicode Sinhala to
read news web sites. The rest of the time they Anglicize or write in
English.

Everything is covered here too, buddy. Adobe apps since 2004, Apple since
2004, Mozilla since 2006, All other modern browsers since 2010. MS Office
2010. Abiword, gNumeric, Linux all the works. IE 8,9 partial. IE 10 full.
So?

>
> 2012/7/5 Naena Guru <naenaguru_at_gmail.com>:
> > Hi, Philippe. Thanks for keeping engaged in the discussion. Too little
> time
> > spent could lead to misunderstanding.
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> 2012/7/4 Naena Guru <naenaguru_at_gmail.com>:
> >> > Philippe Verdy, obviously has spent a lot of time
> >>
> >> Not a lot of time... Sorry.
> >>
> >> > researching the web site
> >> > and even went as far as to check the faults of the web service
> provider,
> >> > Godaddy.com.
> >>
> >> I did not even note that your hosting provider was that company. I
> >> just looked at the HTTP headers to look at the MIME type and charset
> >> declarations. Nothing else.
> >
> > I know that the browser tells it. It is not a big deal, WOFF is the
> > compressed TTF, but TTF gets delivered. If and when GoDaddy fixes their
> > problem, the pages get delivered faster. Or I can make that fix in a
> > .htaccess file. No time!
> >>
> >>
> >> > He called my font a hack font without any proof of it.
> >>
> >> It is really a hack. Your font assigns Sinhalese characters to Latin
> >> letters (or some punctuations) of ISO 8859-1.
> >
> > My font does not have anything to do with Singhalese characters if you
> mean
> > Unicode characters. You are very confusing.
> > A Character in this context is a datatype. In the 80s it was one byte in
> > size and used to signal not to use in arithmetic. (We still did it to
> > convert between Capitals and Simple forms.) In the Unicode character
> > database, a character is a numerical position. A Unicode Sinhala
> character
> > is defined in Hex [0D80 - 0DFF]. Unicode Sinhala characters represent an
> > incomplete hotchpotch of ideas of letters, ligatures and signs. I have
> none
> > of that in the font.
> >
> > I say and know that Unicode Sinhala is a failure. It inhibits use of
> > Singhala on the computer and the network. I do not concern me with
> fixing it
> > because it cannot be fixed. Only thing I did in relation to it is to
> write
> > an elaborate set of routines to *translate* (not map) between constructs
> of
> > Unicode Sinhala characters and romanized Singhala. That is not in the
> font.
> > The font has lookup tables.
> >
> >> It also assigns
> >> contextual variants of the same abstract Sinhalese letters, to ISO
> >> 8859-1 codes,
> >
> > What contexts cause what variants? Looks like you are saying Singhala
> > letters cha
> >>
> >> plus glyphs for some ligatures of multiple Sinhalese
> >> letters to ISO 8859-1 codes, plus it reorders these glyphs so that
> >> they no longer match the Sinhalese logicial order.
> >
> >
> > [assigns] ligatures of multiple Sinhalese letters to ISO 8859-1 codes
> > What is Singhalese logical order?
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> Yes this font is a hack because it pretends to be ISO 8859-1 when it
> >> is not. It is a specific distinct encoding which is neither ISO 859-1
> >> and neither Unicode, but something that exists in NO existing
> >> standard.
> >>
> >> > It has
> >> > only characters relevant to romanized Singhala within the SBCS. Most
> of
> >> > the
> >> > work was in the PUA and Look-up Tables. I am reminded of Inspector
> >> > Clouseau
> >> > that has many gadgets and in the end finds himself as the culprit.
> >>
> >> And you have invented a Inspector Guru gadget for your private use on
> >> your site, instead of developping a TRUE separate encoding that you
> >> SHOULD NOT name "ISO 8859-1". Try to do that, but be aware that the
> >> ISO registry of 8-bit encodings is now frozen. You'll have to convince
> >> the IANA registry to register your new encoding. For now it is
> >> registered nowhere. This is a purely local creation for your site.
> >>
> >> > I will still read and try those other things Philippe suggests, when I
> >> > get
> >> > time. What is important for me is to improve on orthography rules and
> >> > add
> >> > more Indic languages -- Devanagari and Tamil coming up.
> >> >
> >> > As for those who do not want to think rationally and think Unicode is
> a
> >> > religion,
> >>
> >> No. Unicode is a technical solution for a long problem :
> >> interoperability of standards using open technologies. Given that you
> >> do not want to even develop your own encoding as a registered open
> >> standard compatible with a lot of applications (remember that all new
> >> web standards MUST now support Unicode in at least one of its standard
> >> UTF, you're just loosing time here)
> >>
> >> > I can only point to my dilemma:
> >> > http://lovatasinhala.com/assayaa.htm
> >> >
> >> > Have a Happy Fourth of July!
> >>
> >> Next time don't cite me personnaly trying to conveince others that I
> >> have supported or said something I did not write myself. You have
> >> interpreted my words at your convenience, but I don't want to be
> >> associated nominatively and publicly with your personnal
> >> interpretations. Even if I also have my own opinions, I don't want to
> >> cite anyone else's opinions without just quoting his own sentences
> >> (provided that these sentences were public or that I was authorized by
> >> him to quote his sentences in other contexts).
> >>
> >> Stop this abuse of personalities. Thanks.
> >
> >
>
Received on Thu Jul 05 2012 - 00:49:21 CDT