Unicode fonts in Mac OS X

[B. Reusch]

>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 12:35:57 +0100
>From: Ulrich.Stiehl <Ulrich.Stiehl at t-online.de>
>.....
>
>Some are of the opinion that Unicode is a
>way out of this encoding jungle, but a lot of diacritical letters required for
>translitering Indic scripts have not been defined by the Unicode
>consortium, so
>that these additional diacritics must be defined by font makers in
>the "Private
>Use Area" (hexadecimal range E000-F8FF).

Not being a computer-programming pro or a fonts pro, and speaking
only for the Roman transliteration of (Vedic and Classical)
Sanskrit, I beg to disagree.

I have found all the needed characters in the Character Palette for
Unicode fonts -- such as Lucida Grande, included in OS X. When "View
All" is selected in Character Palette, macron vowels and accented s
are found in Latin Extended A; characters with dot above or dot below
are found in Latin Extended Additional; dots for all positions, all
kinds of accents, and many other things are found in Combining
Diacritical Marks.

Now, how about typing all those nifty gadgets from your keyboard with
merely two-to-ten fingers?
After installing US Extended Keyboard from System Preferences, all
Sanskrit diacritics can be easily produced with the sole exception of
Combining Dot Below. Luckily, someone had thought about this before
and done something about it. A non-South-Asia specialist offers his
modified version of US Extended, which he named Latin Extended, to
type dots or macrons below. It is downloadable from his site:
http://quinon.com/files/keylayouts/LatinExtended_X.sit

Finally, if, understandably, you do not like Lucida Grande too much,
there is an (elegant) alternative:
http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/gentium/download.html
Gentium's only drawback, as far as I can see, is that it lacks bold.
As a consolation, Gentium includes Candrabindu.

Greetings,
Beatrice Reusch