Yoruba Language Tone Marks and Subdots (UNICODE)
Toyin Falola
Alternatives: Doulos SIL has both OpenType and Graphite tables. Graphite is an opensource rendering system. Versions of Thunderbird are available for Windows and Linux which ahve Graphite support enabled. These versions of Thunderbird should render Yoruba Unicode emails on older versions of Windows. I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect it should work. Graphite is an Open Source project that is under development. Have a look at http://sila.mozdev.org/grFirefox.html
WEB BASED EMAIL
First issue here is the having web browser support. What I said about email clients also applies to web browsers. You need the right fonts, and input emthod and appropriate rendering. Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox and Opera use the operating systems rendering ... so on WinXP-SP2 and Windows Vista, you should be OK. Jus need an appropriate way of specifying fonts.
There is also the Graphite alternative, with a Graphite enabled version of Firefox available.
Additionally, if you copy an updated version of usp10.dll to internet Explorer 6's directory on your hard disk, Internet Explorer 6 will use that local copy rather than the system version. This is the principle that Sinhala for Internet Explorer 6 uses (http://www.fonts.lk/down.html). In theory this kit should also enable combining diacritic support.
The core problem is the Web interfce to email systems. English language Yahoo and Hotmail interfaces use the Western European character sets. If you type in Unicode and send the email, the users at the other end will not automatically see the yoruba display correctly. The email header will not identify the email as UTF-8 encoded email. It is necessary to manually select the UTF-8 encoding. This amy or amy not work.
>From what I understand gmail supports Unicode, so this may be a better choice for a web based email service than using Yahoo or Hotmail. I haven't used Gmail, so I can guarantee it. Alternatively when I need to send an UTF-8 email in yahoo, I switch to the Vietnamese language Yahoo user interface. This is UTF-8 based and allows me to send UTF-8 emails from Yahoo.
Alternatively, you could enter the Yoruba as HTML numerical character references. In this case email clients that can display html embedded in emails should display the Yoruba text correctly. Text based emails on the other hand will not see the characters, rather they will see the list of numerical character references.
What is necessary is a web based interface that will allow you to specify the encoding of your emails, and that would preserve the correct encoding in the email header when the email is sent. There are also other features, such as being able to specify the font you wnat your messages to display with, etc.
Personally I prefer to use Firefox or Opera rather than Internet Explorer. If IE uses the wrong font to display a page, and that font is missing necessary characters, you will just see boxes instead of characters.
In Firefox and Opera, if the character is missing from the font being used, it will swap fonts and use a differnet font to display that character.
2) When developing websites, it is necessary to to correctly identify the character encoding. UTF-8 should be used. It is also very useful to indicate the primary language of the web page and to also markup any change in languages. For more information look at the resources at http://www.w3.org/International/
Firefox and Opera allow the user to specify CSS rules that can override how a web page is displayed. For some African languages, I can put in a CSS rule that will force a font change in the page for any text in a specific language. If I was viewing a web page in Yoruba, and the web developer had included a language tag identifying the content as Yoruba text, I could then write a rule for Firefox that would tell the browser to use the Charis SIL font for any Yoruba text.
For web services, blogs, discussion borads, wikis and other online tools: they need to support Unicode (both in the web page, but also in all scripts and programs that handle data in the backend of the site), they also need to perform Unicode normalization on any text input. It is also useful if they indicate primary language or any change in the text processing language. Web services should use appropriate fonts to display Yoruba, or allow users to set their own font preferences.
I guess thats my take on the situation at the moment.
Possible solutions for web based email:
--
Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222 (fax)
http://www.toyinfalola.com/
www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Tunde Adegbola
Due credit to Ade Oyegbola's deep insights on Human-Computer Interaction.
I agree with him that "all Yorùbá alphabets, symbols and tonal marks,
whether precomposed or combining are already available in the UNICODE". It
is true and we have used Unicode to do a lot, particularly with the Tahoma
font, which we have found to be very good for our purposes.
However, language technology requires a lot more. The future of human
languages in the information age goes beyond the ability to place texts on
screen or paper and we need to ensure that our Yoruba can share in that
future.
Besides, there are still some problems with the situation as is. Just take
alook at the URLs http://yo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and
http://www.openroad.net.au/languages/african/yoruba/sample.html and you will
see what I mean. The tone marks are all over the palce, and some characters
are not correctly rendered. It can be used as is but it can be better. For
our culture to mater in the information age, we need a lot more.
Tunde
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tunde Adegbola (Ph.D.)
Executive Director
African Languages Technology Initiative
(Alt-I ... Inserting African issues into the agenda of the knowledge age)
www.alt-i.org
President
Tiwa Systems Ltd.
11 Oluyole Way, New Bodija Ibadan, Nigeria.
+234 8034019398
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Toyin Falola <toyin....@mail.utexas.edu>
>Reply-To: yoruba...@googlegroups.com
>To: yoruba...@googlegroups.com
>Subject: Yoruba Affairs - Yoruba Language Tone Marks and Subdots (UNICODE)
>Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2006 17:31:01 -0600
>
>Submission by Ade Oyegbola
><http://www.quicktopic.com/15/H/KKgbRqJUAR8>Yoruba
>language & ICT (fonts, keyboards & applications)
>on the subject matter. Andrew Cunningham did a
>very good job in posting number 252 covering the
>issues of text rending and interoperability under
>UNICODE standard within various network servers
>that makes up the internet. Anybody that cares to
>know more should take the time to visit the
>website.
>
>One more thing, the webmaster of Google Yorùbá
>Affairs website can simply change the default
>font of the website - which is now set to
>{font-family:arial,sans-serif) to a font that has
>all the correct properties for our alphabets,
>like Charis SIL, Doulos SIL or to a lesser extent
>Tahoma, change the charset to UTF-8 and any
>language setting but English. This will allow the
>website to properly display all the tonal marked
>characters correctly.
>
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>
>Posting by Andrew Cunningham to
><http://www.quicktopic.com/15/H/KKgbRqJUAR8>http://www.quicktopic.com/15/H/KKgbRqJUAR8
>posting /m252 on 03-06-2006
>
>Dear Dr. Olamijulo
>
>finally have some time to respond to your posting
><javaScript:void(%20window.open(%22/15/H/KKgbRqJUAR8?m1=238&mN=238&bare=1%22%20,%22QTpopup238%22,%20%22toolbar=0,location=0,directories=0,status=0,menubar=0,scrollbars=1,resizable=1,top=0,left=0,height=320,width=600%22))>/m238
><http://www.quicktopic.com/cgi-bin/link.cgi?link=http%3A%2F%2Fsila.mozdev.org%2FgrFirefox.html&x=232581550.8>http://sila.mozdev.org/grFirefox.html
>
>WEB BASED EMAIL
>
>First issue here is the having web browser
>support. What I said about email clients also
>applies to web browsers. You need the right
>fonts, and input emthod and appropriate
>rendering. Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox
>and Opera use the operating systems rendering ...
>so on WinXP-SP2 and Windows Vista, you should be
>OK. Jus need an appropriate way of specifying
>fonts.
>
>There is also the Graphite alternative, with a
>Graphite enabled version of Firefox available.
>
>Additionally, if you copy an updated version of
>usp10.dll to internet Explorer 6's directory on
>your hard disk, Internet Explorer 6 will use that
>local copy rather than the system version. This
>is the principle that Sinhala for Internet
>Explorer 6 uses
>(<http://www.quicktopic.com/cgi-bin/link.cgi?link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fonts.lk%2Fdown.html&x=232581550.8>http://www.fonts.lk/down.html).
><http://www.quicktopic.com/cgi-bin/link.cgi?link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2FInternational%2F&x=232581550.8>http://www.w3.org/International/
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