Bj Lhundrup wrote:I have asked and asked and one can seem to make me understand what and the importance of Unicode fonts.
Anyone wish to share with me why we need them.
Well Unicode is an international standard, text based encoding - not a non-standard, font / glyph based encoding.
One thing this means that your texts are searchable, indexable, etc. In other words, Unicode Tibetan texts are searchable using standard search engines (like Google, Alta-Vista, Yahoo, etc.); you can easily do search and replace operations in standard word processors & text editors; and use standard text tools like diff to spot differences in versions of Tibetan text files - or in different input versions.
Other things include that your text will work on all different operating systems that use Unicode (including Linux, Unix, Mac OSX & Windows) as you will no longer have to worry about a particular font being available or a particular non-standard encoding being supported on other systems; you can save files with Tibetan names, - and your text will be more or less
"future proof" - since Unicode is going to be the basic standard for
international character & text encoding for many, many years to come just as US ASCII has been the basic standard for English text for many years until now.
In OpenOffice v2.1 you can now automatically sort lists or tables of Dzongkha or Tibetan words into correct Tibetan dictionary order; create a correctly ordered index of Tibetan or Dzongkha words, in a spreadsheet have your dates and numbers appear in either English or Tibetan format depending on the preferences you choose and simply switch between one and the other format just by changing your preferences or a stylesheet - and not re-entering the dates or figures. Presumably there are similar features available in MS Office 2007 running on Windows Vista (I haven't had the opportunity to try this yet) - and as more and more applications are built to handle Unicode and complex scripts there will be less and less need for specialized applications built to handle Tibetan using non standard font based encodings.
Don't get me wrong. When most current Tibetan applications & fonts were built it was impractical or pretty well impossible to use Unicode for Tibetan and some people did an amazingly good job levereging the technology available at the time. There are still quite a number of things which it is easier to do using non-Unicode systems (including formatting pecha) - after all some of these non-Unicode systems had their origins in the 1980's and they have constantly been tweaked and improved since then. So, on some fronts, there is simply still a lot of catching up to do - but that is happening very quickly. If everyone concentrates on Unicode development rather than on systems that, imo, in the end will likely prove a dead-end, then this will happen even faster.
You may also prefer the designs of the non-Unicode Tibetan fonts available to those of the Unicode fonts currently available. However it is a relatively straightforward , albeit time-consuming, task to convert these non-Unicode fonts to a format such as OpenType which supports Unicode - and if the developer wants, at the same time they can add features unavailable in previous font formats. So there is no real reason why we can't use the same font designs for many, many years to come - other than that the developers of those fonts haven't done the conversion yet.
One other thing is that Unicode / OpenType fonts for Tibetan should work with all Tibetan text - so can easily format Unicode Tibetan text in fonts from different developers - just as you can with English text. The number of OpenType Unicode Tibetan fonts available is slowly increasing - and it shouldn't be too long before there are more Unicode Tibetan fonts available than non-Unicode fonts. OpenType also makes it much easier to support different varieties of Tibetan script.
Of course, just when you switch to Unicode is something that you may need to carefully consider. If you are in the midst of a Tibetan book publication project using an older non-Unicode based system it might cause delays and complications to switch right now - but, once your books are printed, please consider converting the input text to Unicode format for long-term archival storage. If you are publishing a Tibetan or Dzongkha language newspaper it may also be difficult to switch to Unicode for another year or two as page layout applications like InDesign, although they support Unicode, have not yet implemented support for complex script shaping of Tibetan text required to use OpenType Tibetan fonts. Of course these things are being worked on.
also see:
Tibetan Fonts at THDL
- Chris
