Writing to Mum in Glagolitic script

[Devin Asay]

On May 21, 2014, at 11:31 AM, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com>
 wrote:

> On 21/05/14 18:19, Devin Asay wrote:
>> Have you tried out the prerelease of LiveCode 7? I'm really curious how your projects will work with it. My understanding is that all of the arcane, language-specific glyph munging rules are handled transparently (or will be). I've fiddled with it a bit with Cyrillic, and one of my students and I experimented with Arabic. The results with Cyrillic were perfect (although just typing Russian has never been problematic in LC, moving text around and looking at chunks of text required lots of hoop-jumping. Arabic and other RTLS still have some problems, but they're light years ahead of what we've had before.
>> 
>> These are things we ought to hammer on during the Global Jam Richard announced last week. LC 7 I think will be a huge step forward for those of us who use Unicode.
> 
> Devin,
> 
> No, I haven't for 2 reasons:
> 
[snip]

> However; "just for fun" (which, in my books at least, is the best reason to do this sort of thing<0, if
> I can find the time this coming weekend, I will try with my PISMO programs, and then, if that works,
> at a lter date with my Devawriter.
> 
> However; as I understand things the problems associated with languages that do not write in a
> straightforward RTL or LTR way will not be sorted out; my Devawriter will still need all its
> sub-routines to arrange letters:
> 
> Consider the Sanskrit word "Karma"; I type in k - a - r - m - a and the output has to be:
> 
> 'kamra' (which is read and pronounced 'karma').
> 
> Similarly with the word "hindi": I type h - i - n - d - i and the output has to do this:
> 
> i - h - i - (nd)  where '(nd)' is a "funny letter" (conjunct consonant) formed when a 'n' knocks up
> against an 'h'.
> 
> I have not found the Unicode system in versions of RR/LC from 2 to 6.7  a source of difficulty;
> in fact, far from it, they have been a source of great joy as I have been able to successfully
> been able to carry my Sanskrit thing "off".
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> "glyph munging rules" (what a whacked-out phrase; lovely) may be there; but certainly not for
> Sanskrit unless one uses exactly the half-cocked halant system that others use that does not
> do the writing system any favours; and certainly not for a writing system that has to access thousands of additional characters in the Personal Private Use areas of the Unicode system that are specific to
> my specialist fonts.
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------

Interesting. So it sounds like nobody handles Sanskrit properly. Now, knowing next to nothing about Devanagari (the point of Devawriter, right?) I threw together a stack in LC 7 DP3 and chose my Devanagari - QWERTY keyboard. Sure enough, it types in characters I don't recognize, but I don't see any transformations happening in the way you describe. I've probably completely missed the point, but I'm interested in what works and what's lacking in LC's unicode implementation. Or maybe it's unicode itself that's lacking, if no other applications get it right either. 

Devin


Devin Asay
Office of Digital Humanities
Brigham Young University