Characters needed for African orthographies in Latin writing system
Mon, 29/09/2020 - 14:43
Projects:
Fonts This is a list of 240 characters required for African orthographies in the Latin writing system.
charlist.txt is the set of 240 single characters, combining diacritics and precomposed characters. Comments mention which character need anchors for composition.
comblist.txt is the set of 285 composed characters known to be used. These can be used to test composition of base characters with combining diacritics.
Both files have comments after the # sign.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| charlist.txt | 2.61 KB |
| comblist.txt | 4.39 KB |
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Previous work on Latin char's needed for African orthographies
Thanks to Friedel for pointing out this document. It would be great if the list had sample glyphs (though it's easy to ask).
Previous work in this area might be useful as a reference - see http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/#char with particular reference to "Notation en Unicode des langues africaines..." The author of that site intended/hoped that someone pick up on this work (i.e. it's open source).
At one point with the PAL project I considered trying to develop a database of character needs, but it seemed that the expense necessary would have been outsized compared to the quality of the data. An alternative idea was to try to build on the eki.ee Letter Database (also referenced on the A12n page), but contacts for permission and possible collaboration went unanswered. It might be worth trying to contact Indrek Hein at EKI to see if there is any interest in resuscitating and updating their Letter Database - ANLoc and the fonts subproject could focus on completing info for African languages...
Characters for South African languages
I just quickly checked this and most characters required for South African languages seem to be there. I'm missing these few for Afrikaans, though. I guess they will mostly be present because of European languages, but I guess it is good to have them there for completeness:
U+00DD
U+00FD
U+00FA
U+00FB
U+00DA
U+00DB
Forgive me if I just missed them.