Unicode (WORD 2004, etc.) issues

[George Hart]

I don't think either of these fonts -- or any unicode fonts I have  
seen -- has the alveolar letters one needs for Tamil and Malayalam  
(and old Telugu and old Kannada) -- an r with a short line beneath,  
an n with a short line beneath, and an l with a short line beneath.   
Also an l with a dot beneath.  Tiger has Tamil unicode built-in,  
along with Devanagari, and both appear to work interchangeably with  
Windows.  Unfortunately, in Word for the Mac the Tamil does not work  
-- it works in Cocoa applications like Nisus, TextEdit, Mail.  It  
would be very nice if we could get a standard Indic Roman font that  
has ALL the diacritics we need, including Arabic and Persian,  
Sanskrit, Dravidian, and anything else that is generally used (though  
I'd draw the line at Emeneau's score or more of diacritics for Toda,  
which must have driven the typesetters at Oxford mad -- not every  
language has unvoiced plosive retroflex fricatives, or whatever,  
fortunately).  It would also be nice to have a good keyboard driver  
for the Mac and Windows -- I have one I implemented for TimesIndian  
in which the backslash (/) is a dead key and allows one to easily  
enter long a (backslash a), etc. etc.  Of course, TimesIndian is not  
unicode.  George Hart

On Dec 29, 2005, at 11:49 AM, Stuart Ray Sarbacker wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> Elizabeth Callahan suggested that opening the custom dictionary in  
> Wordpad and saving it as a unicode text document solved the  
> problems with adding Unicode in windows versions of WORD. I tried  
> the same solution on the Mac by opening the custom dictionary with  
> TextEdit, and saving it as a Unicode UTF-16 document (UTF-8 did not  
> work) and it appears to have largely solved the problem (I can add  
> romanized Sanskrit terms with diacritics to the custom dictionary  
> saving inestimable time).
>
> Many thanks to Elizabeth for this.
>
> Now I feel much better about those two wasted hours on hold with  
> Microsoft listening to what was possibly the worst "muzak" I have  
> ever been forced to listen to!
>
> As for general Unicode support on Mac, as far as I am aware, most  
> people are using either the U of Washington Gandhari Unicode font  
> or the Times Extended Roman font, and the Easyunicode Keyboard  
> (which makes typing with Unicode fonts a breeze, esp. in WORD).  
> Links to these fonts and keyboards can be found at:
>
> http://www.thdl.org/tools/diafonts.html
> http://depts.washington.edu/ebmp/software.php
>
> Best Wishes,
> Stuart
>
> -- 
> Dr. Stuart Sarbacker
> Lecturer in Religion
> Director of Undergraduate Studies
> Department of Religion
> Northwestern University
> http://www.religion.northwestern.edu/faculty/sarbacker.html