The supposed lack of support for Mari Unicode Cyrillic on Windows has gotten wide media attention in Russia, and regrettably it’s a simple case of people not knowing how to work their computer. In one television report, a woman complains that her printouts of Mari materials from an Internet cafe are gibberish because they don’t have the non-standard font Mari Times New Roman, yet in the Internet cafes I’ve visited in Yoshkar-Ola it’s trivial to install your own fonts when you start your session.

There’s also numerous misunderstandings of the nature of Unicode. A recent article at MariUver brings attention to an obsolete Mari letter:

Until 1929 there was a sixth extra letter, yeru (ы) with a breve. This sign was used quite often in printed materials in the beginning of the 20th century.

In order to translate old Mari newspapers, magazines and books into modern electronic formats we need that letter. But it’s not to be found in the table of Unicode signs.

Well, it’s not to be found in the tables because it’s not a precomposed character, but it’s trivial to produce the letter from the combination of u+044b cyrillic small letter yeru and u+0306 combining breve. Here’s a screenshot from my computer.

Surely there are some Unicode-savvy native speakers of Mari out there. Would that they translate basic introductions to Unicode into Mari to give to their compatriots.

Three Mari speakers have written a long statement in the form of an ‘open letter to Bill Gates’ calling for the inclusion of certain characters to the standard Windows fonts so that Mari speakers no longer have to rely on antiquated solution.

Much Mari content on the web is still written in 8-bit encoding schemes that require one to install special and non-standard fonts, and without that special font the content is gibberish. While the Mari world is increasingly embracing Unicode, generally these webpages use Unicode’s Cyrillic block-characters for the bulk of the writing, but then place the Latin-block characters ö and ÿ for Mari’s two rounded vowels. Of course, that’s not how it’s supposed to work at all.

However, even were the call for default Windows support successful, it wouldn’t swiftly bring the Mari community to a greater and proper use of Unicode. Often, computers in Mari El are antiquated, and I’ve encountered many Mari speakers using versions of Windows from the 1990s. Who knows how many years would have to pass before these fonts were present by default on the majority of computers in the Mari-speaking world.

Some might bring up the fact that Windows has a universal font for all world languages called Arial Unicode MS! But what if not everyone like Arial, what if someone wants to write in his own native language using the font Times? What should those thousands of Windows users do? And generally, it rather seems that small peoples like us are left with just Arial Unicode MS. What should be done about sites that don’t want to use Arial Unicode MS? Where can you publish thousands of books, thousands of pages, using a font other than Arial Unicode MS?

Well, my response would be, regarding print publication: give your texts to a typesetter who already knows how to efficiently and properly prepare publications in whatever script, because the writers shouldn’t be thinking about typefaces themselves. Historically, the major presses of the Finno-Ugrian peoples have produced fine-looking books (pity about that Soviet-era paper though). In recent years, however, the quality of these publications has diminished, and there is a worrying trend of self-publication where apparently people think that if they have Microsoft Word, then they are qualified to typeset their books themselves.

I would hope to see the survival of professional-quality typesetting in Mari. One of my big projects this year is producing Mari hyphenation files for LaTeX, and would that Mari-language writers turn to me or others using similar appropriate tools when it comes time to prepare their manuscript for publication.