[ILUG] Ogham on linux

[Caolan McNamara]

On Fri, 2007-06-22 at 17:35 +0100, David Golden wrote:
> On Friday 22 June 2007 15:39, Caolan McNamara wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> 
> Indeed - it followed the line of any edges or (later) inscribed stem 
> lines on the stone face - but those stem lines are horizontal 
> left-to-right in the manuscript images of ogham one can find on-line, 
> at least after skipping the large numbers of wacky new-ager sites that 
> have latched on to ogham.

Though if you want to see modern day whacky scripts, then the Indic
languages have some pretty complex character combination rules, e.g
Malayalam and Oriya, with all sorts of weird reordering rules and glyph
substitution stuff required to render them. You can look at the
IndicReordering stuff and the syllable statetables in pango or icu to
get a feel for what's involved in the (to me, rather odd) break text
into syllables, re-order the characters, run the result through the
truetype font glyph substitution tables and render process. As well as
the ZeroWidthJoiner and ZeroWidthNonJoiner whackiness to override some
of that to either glue bits together or to forcible unglue bits apart.

Khmer is also reportedly one of the most complex to render (of the
"common" languages anyway), I've not had to deal with that one yet
though. The graphite people have support for way more obscure scripts by
putting more of the complex text glyph substitution and combination
rules into the fonts itself http://scripts.sil.org/RenderingGraphite 

I spoke to a guy involved in minority languages fairly recently and he
had some interesting stories about using graphite to capture complex
writing systems which don't fit into standard rendering frameworks, but
I haven't seem examples personally. In general though his work was
helping minority language groups develop their own written languages
from scratch. Generally taking the surrounding majority language's
script and using it to transcribe their own language. One story that
caught me was some group that had a separate "woman's language", they
had a common language for the entire group, but a separate one for just
among women. Thing was though that there was only one speaker of it
left, so a language of one.

C.