Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Unicode 5 Scripts

Unicode 5, released August 2006, includes 5 new scripts. Here is the current status of their usability on the Mac as far as I know. Where there is a font but no keyboard, the characters can of course still be entered directly from the Character Palette.

N'ko

Fonts: Code2000
Keyboards: Xenotypetech

Phoenician

Fonts: ALPHABETUM Unicode, Code2001 and MPH 2B Damase
Keyboards: Phoenician.keylayout

Phags-Pa

Fonts: Babelstone
Keyboards: Phags-pa.keylayout

Balinese

Fonts: None
Keyboards: None

Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform

Fonts: (Hittite glyphs) FreeIdg
Keyboards: None

13 comments:

Unknown said...

Phoenician isn't working for me. The error I get in Ukelele is:

The file was not valid XML:
Found illegal character while parsing element tag at line 2268.

If you can fix this, please let me know. Thanks!

Tom Gewecke said...

I have put a new version on my iDisk. Try it and let me know if it works OK now.

Unknown said...

Well, I guess that depends on your definition of "works okay". Can I select it in the input menu? Yes. Can I type with it? Yes. Does it output Phoenician? No. It's typing Hebrew, oddly enough. I *do* have both Code2001 and MPH 2B Damase installed. Uhm, suggestions?

Tom Gewecke said...

Could you have a junk font installed that puts Hebrew at the Phoenician codepoints? What app are you using. Here is a screen shot of the text produced by this layout on my machine in TextEdit (the three rows of keys from top to bottom).

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/ph.jpg

Unknown said...

Okay, so I rebooted. The only fonts installed are system fonts and Code2001 and MPH 2B Damase. Still getting Hebrew when I type.

Screenshot here:

http://www.rm-f.net/~batshua/NotPhoenician.png

Tom Gewecke said...

It looks like Lucida Grande. I can't duplicate this problem and can't imagine how it would occur. What OS version are you using?

Unknown said...

The latest version of Tiger, 10.4.11.

Tom Gewecke said...

10.4 will only do Phoenician left to right, but the layout still works fine for me. Do you have any Hebrew keyboard layouts active? It seems like the Phoenician layout is being replaced by a Hebrew one (but I haven't seen that happen before either).

Unknown said...

I do have both of the Hebrew keyboards active. Okay. I've tried it in another account, and even with Hebrew on, it works fine. I think I've got a borked preference somewhere in my main account, but darned if I know what the file would be called.

Tom Gewecke said...

Likely candidates are the .plists with HIToolbox or SystemUIServer in their name. Also you can just move the whole Home/Library/Preferences folder to your desktop and restart. Fresh ones will be recreated and you can add back the old ones with info you need.

Unknown said...

It appears to be working now. Thanks so much!

Unknown said...

One more thing. I found it frustrating that the keyboard didn't respond to qwerty command keys, so I tried to meld one from what you gave me an the Dvorak QWERTY command key layout. It has a few flaws, but if you email me, I'll send it to you to put up on the site.

Tom Gewecke said...

You can send it to me at tom at bluesky dot org. By the way, if you upgrade to Leopard 10.5, it does Phoenician right-to-left, which I think is more correct than left-to-right.