[ILUG] Ogham on linux

[Caolan McNamara]

On Fri, 2007-06-22 at 15:23 +0100, Michael Watterson wrote:
> David Golden wrote:
> > Hey. Cool.  I installed a unicode font with the ogham characters
> > defined, set my xkb keymap to "ie(ogham)" (KDE has a GUI for this, 
> > presumably GNOME does too), and I can type in ogham with AltGr+letter
> > in unicode apps...
> >
> > ᚛ ᚁᚂᚃᚄᚅ ᚆᚇᚈᚉᚊ ᚋᚌᚍᚎᚏ ᚐᚑᚒᚓᚔ ᚕᚖᚗᚘᚙ ᚚ ᚜
> >
> > keymap of the above* (though N.B. not the Ogham letter's sound
> > value in all cases) is AltGr+
> >
> >   
> >> /BLFSN/HDTCQ/MGVZR/AOUEI/WKJYX/P/<
> >>     
> >
> > * Assuming I or the list server didn't screw up the encoding of 
> > this mail - n.b. if you see a row of square boxes in your unicode 
> > mail reader (most GUI ones these days), I mightn't have messed up
> > the encoding, you just mightn't have a font with ogham in it.
> >  
> >   
> Works in IRC but not Skype, oddly.
> 
> Normally though it would be vertical.

Well, typical examples of ogham are carved into stone pillars, so for a
long sequence of text while it would indeed start off vertically from
the bottom left moving upwards, it would be carved horizontally across
the top before vertically downwards on the next edge, so the
directionality of the script seems fairly loose.

Some of the older Greek scripts were boustrophedon which had a similar
left to right, and then right to left on alternating lines concept.
Which is sort of a vaguely related idea. I don't think there are any
living boustrophedon scripts, fairly certain we didn't add any support
for it in OOo though we considered it for a micro-second.

C.