Writing to Mum in Glagolitic script

Devin Asay devin_asay at byu.edu
Wed May 21 11:19:50 EDT 2014


On May 21, 2014, at 1:06 AM, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com>
 wrote:

> On 21/05/14 05:24, Alejandro Tejada wrote:
>> Hi Richmond,
>> 
>> Could you create any kind of custom text editor
> 
> Yes: my PISMO program is just a (much simplified) version of
> my Devawriter program using a different writing set.
> 
> The main difference lies in the fact that both Cyrillic and Glagolitic (the writing systems used in
> my PISMO program) are written from left-to-right in a straight-forward way.
> 
> Devanagari (like many Indian writing systems) is written from left-to-right, but there is a problem
> to do with the positioning of a post-vocalic R, a short I (which is written before a consonant that
> it is sounded after, and the fact that a consonantal cluster aggregates into a new written form called
> a 'conjunct consonant'. So Devawriter contains something in the order of 5,000 rules to make
> sure that when end-users tap in individual glyphs (the Devanagari script is an abugida, not an
> alphabet) the 'magic' happens [mind you, programming the thing didn't feel very magical at
> times].

Richmond,

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.

Regards,

Devin

Devin Asay
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