From: Doug Ewell (dewell@roadrunner.com)
Date: Fri Jul 04 2008 - 15:28:08 CDT
Ngwe Tun quoted the Myanmar Times, which evidently doesn't have a lot of
on-staff experts in character encoding:
> "The new Unicode font not only includes the Myanmar language, but also
> other ethnic languages that are accepted by Unicode Consortium.
Unicode encodes characters that are used for writing languages. It does
not "accept" languages.
> At present, Shan, Mon and Kayin font types will be included in this
> Unicode font," he said.
For clarity, Unicode also does not specify, produce, or approve fonts.
> "We could complete the development of the font by the last week of
> August when we get confirmation from the Unicode Consortium's meeting
> to be held in Hong Kong at that time," Ko Htoo Myint Naung said.
The Unicode Web page doesn't show any meetings in Hong Kong in August.
There is a WG2 meeting scheduled for October in Hong Kong. Such a
meeting might involve discussion of the 18 Myanmar characters still
remaining in the Pipeline.
> The present font used in the Myanmar version of Wikipedia is Padauk,
> which was written according to the Unicode 4.1 standard,
Which means roughly that it supports only those characters encoded as of
Unicode 4.1 (March 2005), and not the ones encoded since then. (But see
below.)
> I got some question after reading. To clarify the truth as in.
> 1) Had Unicode published or released representation of Mon, Shan and
> Karen encoding specification document like UTN#11?
If it's not listed in the "Unicode Technical Notes" page, there is no
UTN on this. You might check with the authors of UTN #11 to see if they
would consider updating their paper to add a discussion of these
additional languages written with the Myanmar script.
A UTN is not a formal Unicode specification, but a paper that might be
useful for background or additional insight on an implementation issue.
> 2) Will Unicode Consortium meeting decide Fonts for Burmese, Shan, Mon
> and Karen?
Unicode does not "decide" fonts. They encode characters, whose glyphs
may subsequently be added to fonts.
> 3) Are there any practice for setting default font in other language
> wikipedia? (it's out of question for Unicode Mailing List)
It is. Having said that, Wikipedia (like many Web sites) uses a
stylesheet to determine the display font. Since I don't have Paduak,
when I visit the Myanmar Wikipedia page, I see it in Code2000. You
would have to tell your browser to ignore the fonts specified by the
stylesheet and use yours instead, which often doesn't turn out as well
as hoped.
> 4) Is it true current Padauk font in wikipedia is encoded with Unicode
> 4.1 standard?
SIL says, "Padauk is a fully capable Unicode 5.1 font supporting all the
Myanmar characters in the standard. Thus it provides support for
minority languages as well, but in a Burmese rendering style."
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=Padauk
-- Doug Ewell * Arvada, Colorado, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14 http://www.ewellic.org http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages ˆ
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jul 04 2008 - 15:31:29 CDT