CSX+ Encoding and other Encodings used by Indologists (fwd)

[A. Glass]

I should clarify a point in the last posting. The Gandhari Unicode font
(GU) does contain characters in the Private Use area (PUA). However, since
the new version of GU contains a complete set of combining diacritics, it
is nolonger necessary to use the PUA glyphs. I have kept the PUA characters
in the font for the sake of backwards compatibility with older versions.
Also the precomposed characters in the PUA often look better than
composite glyphs created with combining diacritics, so some people,
particularly typesetters, will prefer to continue using the PUA characters. This will
be the case until I produce an OpenType version of the font.

However, as Stefan Baums pointed out in his posting, only a very few
characters will require combining diacritics or PUA glyphs, for normal
Indological work. The GU font was created for transliteration of Gandhari,
which requires numerous special diacritics. Most of the PUA glyphs in the
GU font are for Gandhari, Nuristani and Dardic. So this complaint about
Unicode fonts should really be a minor concern. The benefits of
standardization presented by Unicode are far greater.

Andrew Glass

_____________________
Andrew Glass
Department of Asian Languages & Literature
353521
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington 98195
asg at u.washington.edu

On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Stefan Baums wrote:

> > but a lot of diacritical letters required for
> > translitering Indic scripts have not been defined by the Unicode
> > consortium
>
> Could you give examples?  In my experience, all characters used in
> Indology _are_ in Unicode; for a very few, one has to use combining
> diacritics, but most are even available precomposed, and this
> difference would be hidden from the end user anyway.  Maybe you would
> like to give the Gandhari Unicode font a try:
>
>    http://depts.washington.edu/ebmp/software.html
>
> This is a font that does cover all Indological diacritics, and in
> recent versions does not use the Private Use Area anymore.  I do think
> that Unicode is the one character encoding that Indologists should
> migrate to, and then the regrettable incompabilities between
> institute's private encodings that you mention will disappear.
>
> Best regards,
> Stefan Baums
>
> --
> Stefan Baums
> Asian Languages and Literature
> University of Washington
>