Painful to read something easily solved by free software, even in 1993
most free software were CMKY agnostic until recently.
I think you meant "ignorant"...
The Upside-Down "e" - an Editor's Nightmare (1993)
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Re: The Upside-Down "e" - an Editor's Nightmare (1993)
#12"You're right. Man should not be a slave to technology. The 'tail shouldn't wag the dog'. But that's idealistic and unreal. Technology always has its own limitations and parameters. It's not the first time technology has shaped the alphabet. The same story has been repeating itself since the origin of the alphabet. Greek and Latin were clearly determined by the hammer and chisel against marble - it's easier to carve…
I'm reminded of the English language and the "thorn" character (Þ). It used to be the character for the sound "th" but it fell out of favor and the final nail in its coffin happened when the printing press came into play--the typefaces were imported from Germany and Italy and they didn't have thorn. The printers substituted "y" for a while (hence "Ye olde shoppe"--It's actually pronounced "The", not "yee").
So I would say it's not unheard of for an alphabet to be shaped by technology. We English speakers are not the worse for wear.
Re: The Upside-Down "e" - an Editor's Nightmare (1993)
#13Yes, when you ask a committee of linguists to design an orthography for you --- you get a godawful almost-IPA "one phoneme = one grapheme" academic exercise which is utterly impractical for everyday use. (Again, an object lesson in the robustness of top-down-designed systems vs. ones which evolved from centuries of use). Azerbaijan would have had the same problem even if they had stayed with the Cyrillic alphabet. E.g. after Kazakhstan became independent, they had lots of trouble trying to use Kazakh as the administrative language due to a shortage of typewriters with the appropriate letters.
Uzbekistan is greatly underappreciated for having done something really neat after the Soviet breakup --- designing an orthography with no "funny letters". They use context to distinguish the "back" and "front" versions of phonemes like i [1]. And in the two cases where that would be too confusing (o and u), they put an apostrophe after the letter --- i.e. u', instead of something like ü.
[1] Turkey, which speaks a closely-related language, solved the "front i" vs "back i" problem by making one dotted and the other dotless --- those of us here probably know all of the toLowerCase-related bugs that caused, I think articles about this have been posted a couple of months ago
Re: The Upside-Down "e" - an Editor's Nightmare (1993)
#14Aren't they talking about U+018F and U+0259?
Nowadays, adding that glyph to an existing font could be a very easy thing to do. It depends a lot on the font design you're after...
Fonts released under a free license would have helped.
A nice font editor: http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/
Re: The Upside-Down "e" - an Editor's Nightmare (1993)
#15Painful to read something easily solved by free software, even in 1993
Really? One problem was the lack of diverse fonts with an ə in it. How does free software solve that? Another was the different programs used different ways to input the ə character. Free software doesn't help there - why would they all use the same entry sequence? A third was that no keyboard supported that common character in the home row. While key remappers exist, what should the new standard layout be? Had they…
Bitmap fonts are easy. I made a truetype font in the 1990s using CorelDraw so I know that's not hard. Keyboard maps, again trivial. And don't discount the power of a felt tip when it comes to marking a keyboard.
Re: The Upside-Down "e" - an Editor's Nightmare (1993)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? One problem was the lack of diverse fonts with an ə in it. How does free software solve that? Another was the different programs used different ways to input the ə character. Free software doesn't help there - why would they all use the same entry sequence? A third was that no keyboard supported that common character in the home row. While key remappers exist, what should the new standard layout be? Had they…
Bitmap fonts are easy. I made a truetype font in the 1990s using CorelDraw so I know that's not hard. Keyboard maps, again trivial. And don't discount the power of a felt tip when it comes to marking a keyboard.
The article goes into well-written details of why what you suggested here was tried and didn't work. 1) they also wanted print fonts, 2) they made a bitmap font but it didn't scale right, 3) people want a large variety of font forms, which they couldn't provide. 4) At the OS level, what do you map your key to, if the character code doesn't exist? 5) Applications chose different, incompatible key-bindings, and 6) for the entire country?
There's also a difference between making a font and making a good, generally usable font, just like I as a 7th grader could program, but they weren't good, generally usable programs.