From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Jul 04 2008 - 15:53:27 CDT
At 14:28 -0600 2008-07-04, Doug Ewell wrote:
>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.
Be fair, Doug. You don't speak Burmese. They mean, of course,
"characters that support Burmese and also a number of minority
languages in the Union of Myanmar".
>>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.
The article refers to a font which is being developed that supports
Unicode 5.1 characters.
>>"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 meeting is, as you say, in October, and Htoo Myint Naung is,
prudently, awaiting the results of PDAM 6.2 before proceeding with
early implementation.
>>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.)
The Myanmar Wikipedia is a mess, of course, because of the plethora
of Unicode and pseudo-Unicode fonts out there.
>>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?
There is no UTN, but there are now Mon, Shan, and Karen characters encoded.
>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.
Far as I know there aren't major issues involving the new characters.
>>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.
Yes, I don't know what Ngwe Tun is asking here.
>>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.
I have been talking to Jimmy Wales about helping to sort out the
Myanmar Wikipedia, and I agree that this list is not the forum for
discussion about it.
-- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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