[Silgraphite-devel] Sawndip Sawdenj (Zhuang) square character script

[Achim G. <ac...@as...>]

Hi all,

I was observing the graphite list for a while now... Today I want to get
active myself.

I have a couple important questions about graphite and hope you are patient
enough to read my initial explanation and questinos.

I would appreciate as much input I can get on this.

On a trip down to Guangxi Province in China I met up with a group of
different scholars working on the traditional Zhuang square character
script. The characters look almost like Chinese. They are written with the
same radicals / particles but they are completely different.

One group supported by the local government wants to document all characters
in various ancient texts. They estimated about 50.000 different characters.

A different group of Chinese scholars want to write their research
publications in square characters. They want a system on a CD that installs
on a PC and enables them to write.

There are other teams including SIL, which are doing research on various
dialects in this area. I am related to this projects.

As you can see there are different interests with one in common: All want to
write square characters in (dictionaries, research papers, etc.)


First question:

Is Graphite capable to produce a 50.000 character font? Do we run into
limits in UNICODE? How can we overcome this? Do we have to create our own
code page?
How workable might it be to create a normalized font with the most common
10.000 square characters?

Second question:

In my understanding open office is getting ready for graphite. With keyman I
can make an input method. Are there already examples where graphite is used
in a lager not highly educated community.

Third question:

Can we create out of the graphite smart font an ordinary ttf font with the
various constructed glyphs to use it in word processors on Mac OS, Linux and
Windows? 


Here are some key ideas we had:

Create a client server application which allows collecting linguistic
information and making statistics. 
a) Client server --> many people should be able to contribute (editor and
revisors)
b) Client software should allow to construct square characters to produce
the GDL file 
c) Different filters should allow various outputs according to the needs.


==> how much effort would it take to make a client interfacing with the
graphite engine / compiler / batch jobs enabling the user to see the changes
he makes on the fly.
==> which programming language would be best to do this?

==> is there something similar around we can use as a start?


Again I and all our team members would appreciate your input into this!

Greetings - Achim



Achim W. Gerber 

JHF - IT Manager 

 

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