I encourage my readers in the sidebar to view this weblog with the fonts provided by the Dejavu project. However, I would like to remind readers that it’s not enough to just install these fonts, as one also should upgrade them frequently. Version 2.25 of the Dejavu fonts was released earlier this week, and in [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
This is somewhat old news, but still interesting. The developers of the ISO 639-3 standard, a code that aims to define three-letter identifiers for all known human languages, decided in March to consider Provençal a subset of Occitan, and so now Provençal material is to be marked up with three-letter code oci for Occitan.
A neat discovery recently was Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 38th ed. 1978), the handbook for transforming inconsistent manuscript into the beauty that is the traditional Oxford appearance, which is continued today most notably in the Clarendon Press offerings. Originally written by typesetter Horace Hart [...]
I came across an old article from a 1989 issue of TUGboat called ‘Lexicography with TeX’ that describes how the Institute of Lexicography of the University of Iceland typeset its etymological dictionary with TeX. The results are very handsome, and considering that the trials and tribulations they had to go largely disappeared in successive versions [...]
Computer font projects face the challenge of covering not only the English alphabet but the many other Latin variants as well as even more exotic scripts. An example is the DejaVu fonts, recommended for viewing my personal website and weblog, by the way (but make sure you update upon a new release). I was naive [...]
After finding my guide “Typesetting Old Church Slavonic with LaTeX” Isao Yasuda wrote to tell me about his package OldSlav, which enables the typesetting of older Cyrillic texts with beautiful traditional fonts provided by the SlavTeX collection. This is of limited appeal to students of historical linguistics, but very useful indeed for those who have [...]
Having survived the London airport madness that began late last week just as I left, and having made it to Helsinki, with significant expense and delay due to canceled flights, I’ll get back in business here. Since it wasn’t so long ago that all celebrated the appearance of Unicode version 4.1 with its new support [...]
Many of the reading selections in Robert Auty’s Handbook of Old Church Slavonic: Part II Texts and Glossary (London: The Athlone Press, 1960) present little challenge as they are from the OCS translation of the New Testament and so are already familiar to the student. However, one selection sure to be unknown to readers is [...]