Gillian
One of our partner agencies - the National Association of CABx has been
working over the past couple of years with the Lord Chancellor's Department
and now the Legal Services Commission to deliver their Adviceguide website
in non-roman fonts. This project involved BT Consulting doing a significant
amount of work to prototype methods of delivering non roman fonts.
I'm not directly involved in the project, but my understanding of the BT
report is that it concluded that Unicode fonts are not sufficiently reliable
to provide a solution, except possibly for Japanese where commercial demand
has led to bug free a Unicode solution.
The solution that NACAB has adopted for its multilingual website (to be
launched in May) is that of downloadable fonts, which is viable although
difficult. Some languages - Urdu for example are particularly challenging.
The downloadable fonts solution requires tight control over the fonts used
throughout the editorial process.
The BT report also looked at keyboard and search issues, and I think
concluded that the use of non-roman keyboards requires such specialist
skills that the number of potential users is likely to be small.
For more information you could try contacting the NACAB project manager
Adrian Barclay - [log in to unmask], although he won't thank me as
he is deep into testing the new site.
Martin
-----Original Message-----
From: Gillian Evison [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 22 April 2002 12:15
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Non-roman Unicode font solutions: contacts sought
At the Digital Shikshapatri project we are interested in making contact
with any other digitisation projects working with languages in non-roman
scripts e.g. Gujarati, Urdu, Chinese, Japanese to share information about
Unicode fonts (other than MS Ariel Unicode, which has a file size to large
to be a practical option on many computers), keyboard mapping solutions and
text search facilities.
Talking with case officers at last Friday's Consrtium Leaders meeting
suggested that a number of projects may be grappling with these complex
issues. As there seem to be no easy answers, we might benefit from keeping
in touch with each other and sharing information,
Dr. Gillian Evison
(Digital Shikshapatri)
The Indian Institute Library
A department of the Bodleian Library
Oxford
OX1 3BG
Tel. 01865 277083
Fax. 01865 277182
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