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Welcome to Computers and Writing Systems

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Scripts Around the World

The Non-Roman Script Initiative

The NRSI is a department of SIL International whose task is to provide guidance, information, research and development for SIL International and its partners to facilitate the use of non-Roman and complex scripts in linguistic study, translation, literacy and publishing.

Our vision is that language communities and the people who work for them be able to work effectively and productively regardless of the writing system used in a given community, i.e., that script-related computing issues do not impede them in their work.

Recent additions and updates

Resources that include support for Unicode 5.1

Fonts:

Charis SIL and Doulos SIL
- The 17 of our PUA characters that were added to Unicode 5.1 are accessible by both the PUA and Unicode codepoints. See footnote1
- This is the only change to these fonts. No new glyphs or features were added.
Andika Basic and Gentium Basic
- Four (4) of our PUA characters that were added to Unicode 5.1 are accessible by both the PUA and Unicode codepoints. See footnote2
Unicode BMP Fallback Font

Keyboards:

Windows IPA Keyman and MSKLC keyboard
- upstep, downstep, hook v (bilabial flap) and hook w all use their Unicode 5.1 codepoints now.

Unicode 5.1 Latin and Cyrillic characters – sorted

Unicode Character Properties Excel Workbook

TECkit including Encore2Unicode

SIL Corporate PUA Assignments

Mapping files:

IPA93 to Unicode 5.1 and IPA1990 to Unicode 5.1
- Unicode 5.1 now supports all characters that were in IPA93 and IPA-1990
SIL PUA to Unicode 5.1 Mapping

Andika Font Annie Olsen, 2008-05-05; 29583 reads

Andika is a sans serif, Unicode-compliant font designed especially for literacy use, taking into account the needs of beginning readers. The focus is on clear, easy-to-perceive letterforms that will not be readily confused with one another.

Gentium Basic Fonts Victor Gaultney, 2008-04-04; 54484 reads

Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic are font families based on the original Gentium design, but with additional weights. The "Book" family is slightly heavier. Both families come with a complete regular, bold, italic and bold italic set of fonts. These "Basic" fonts, do not, however, support Cyrillic, Greek or full IPA.

TECkit Jonathan Kew, 2008-04-07; 13129 reads

The latest release of TECkit adds support for Unicode version 5.1. TECkit is a low-level toolkit intended to be used by other applications that need to perform encoding conversions (e.g., when importing legacy data into a Unicode-based application).

In addition to TECkit, several items have been updated for Unicode 5.1, including Unicode Character Properties Excel Workbook, Unicode BMP Fallback Font, Encore2Unicode and TECkit maps for IPA93, IPA 1990 and SIL PUA.

Dai Banna SIL Fonts Adrian Cheuk, 2008-06-06; 3777 reads

The Dai Banna SIL Fonts are the Unicode version of their predecessor, SIL Dai Banna Fonts. Apart from a few additional characters such as Chinese punctuation marks, the design is the same and represents a new rendering of the New Tai Lue (Xishuangbanna Dai) script, which was first added to Unicode 4.1. These fonts include a complete set of New Tai Lue consonants, vowels, tones and digits, along with punctuation and other useful symbols. A basic set of Latin glyphs, including Arabic numerals, is also provided. Chinese punctuation used in New Tai Lue texts are included as well. Two font families, differing only in weight, allow for a wide range of uses.

Padauk Font Martin Hosken, 2007-11-12; 24175 reads

Padauk is a smart font capable of rendering Burmese and the Myanmar script.

FontUtils Martin Hosken, Bob Hallissy, 2008-06-11; 7859 reads

This package includes Windows executable versions of the scripts supplied as part of the Perl Font::TTF::Scripts package.

SIL TypeTuner Alan Ward, 2008-06-24; 3820 reads

TypeTuner can change the default glyphs, line metrics, and behaviors in our SIL Roman fonts.

Ezra SIL Hebrew Unicode Font NRSI staff, 2007-10-03; 220600 reads

Home page for the Ezra SIL Unicode fonts.

2007-10-03: Version 2.5.1 now available! This version fixes a few minor bugs.

Namdhinggo SIL L font for the Limbu script Victor Gaultney, 2007-06-14; 4260 reads

Namdhinggo SIL L is a font for the Limbu, or Kirat Sirijonga, script used by around 400,000 people in Nepal and India. The current version uses a pre-Unicode encoding.

Zaghawa Beria Font Annie Olsen, 2007-05-31; 5437 reads

Zaghawa Beria is a font developed from an alphabet which is based on camel branding marks in western Sudan and eastern Chad.

When to Convert to Unicode Albert Bickford, Jim Brase and Lorna Priest, 2007-05-11; 4741 reads

This article will help you recognize whether you and your language data have entered the window of opportunity for converting your data to Unicode. It will also help you predict whether you are approaching the end of the window: the point where a conversion is necessary. It will help you decide whether now is the time to convert.

SILConverters 2.6 (and 2.6.1) Bob Eaton, Mark Penny, 2008-01-08; 43984 reads

This package provides tools through which you can change the encoding, font, and/or script of text in Microsoft Word documents, XML documents, and SFM text and lexicon documents. It also installs a system-wide repository to manage your encoding converters and transliterators (TECkit, CC, ICU, Perl, or Python based, as well as support for adding custom transduction engines).

Articles of general interest

The NRSI Model for Implementing Writing Systems Melinda Lyons, Victor Gaultney, 2001-07-04; 9724 reads

Over its short history, the Non-Roman Script Initiative of SIL International has developed a model for using computers to implement the various writing systems that are needed for text input, storage, processing, and output.

The Digital Divide Alan Conner, 2001-01-01; 7307 reads

SIL chartered the Non-Roman Script Initiative (NRSI) to enable ethnic minorities to bridge the digital divide. NRSI participates in the work of the Unicode Consortium, an international nonprofit founded to establish a universal standard for representing each character of all the world's writing systems on the computer.

An introduction to keyboard design theory: What goes where? Martin Hosken, 2003-02-17; 39936 reads

Designing a keyboard is relatively easy: you just allocate codepoints to keystrokes. The difficulty comes when trying to decide what codepoints to assign to what keystrokes. Do you design based around the characters on the keytops of a user's keyboard or the relative position of the keys? What do you do if you want to be able to type more characters than there are keys in your keyboard?

Glossary Melinda Lyons, et al., 2001-09-01; 15859 reads

A glossary of terms associated with implementing writing systems compiled by the NRSI.

U+F19C U+A71B MODIFIER LETTER RAISED UP ARROW
U+F19D U+A71C MODIFIER LETTER RAISED DOWN ARROW
U+F19E U+A71D MODIFIER LETTER AFRICANIST DOWNSTEP
U+F19F U+A71E MODIFIER LETTER AFRICANIST UPSTEP
U+F208 U+2C6D LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SMALL ALPHA
U+F21A U+2C73 LATIN SMALL LETTER W WITH HOOK
U+F21B U+2C72 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER W WITH HOOK
U+F245 U+A72B LATIN SMALL LETTER TRESILLO
U+F246 U+A72D LATIN SMALL LETTER CUATRILLO
U+F25A U+A727 LATIN SMALL LETTER HENG
U+F25B U+2C6E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER M WITH HOOK
U+F25F U+2C71 LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH RIGHT HOOK
U+F1E7 U+A788 MODIFIER LETTER LOW CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT
U+F1E9 U+A789 MODIFIER LETTER COLON
U+F1EA U+A78A MODIFIER LETTER SHORT EQUALS SIGN
U+F26A U+A78B LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SALTILLO
U+F21D U+A78C LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO

U+F1E9 U+A789 MODIFIER LETTER COLON
U+F1EA U+A78A MODIFIER LETTER SHORT EQUALS SIGN
U+F26A U+A78B LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SALTILLO
U+F21D U+A78C LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO

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