Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Reflection

Thanks to fellow team members who encouraged me to continue this blog. I think I've got comments enabled now. Feel free to ask questions as well - I may not have an answer but it will provoke discussion.

Back in 1994-95 when I struggled through developing the WinMac Dene Fonts, the only resources I had were people I could meet in person or by phone, and printed manuals and catalogs. Trial and error required a lot of sneaker-net and snail-mailing floppy disks to colleagues. I remember getting long distance dial-up in 1996 and discovering the awesome power of email collaboration.

Working with others on Unicode for Dene Languages has already saved me re-inventing the wheel enough times in this last week to equip a Bombardier. What a privilege to be part of this round!

Monday, January 18, 2010

Starting Again

15 years after WinMac DeneFonts, a better system is on the horizon. Two weeks ago I started programming a new keyboard to take advantage of the Unicode fonts.

Did you know it's now possible to compose Dene Language documents in Arial, Times New Roman, and several other fonts? Yes, the versions of those fonts on my Vista machine have all the characters needed. Soon there will be no more need to download fonts just to read and print Dene Language documents. No more "Tåîchô" when you wrote "Tlicho" with all the diacritics.

So I was writing this new keyboard file to type the special characters and could see that it was going to work, when I ran into a snag. I called around to consult with some Dene Language experts and found out there was a group of people who had the same idea at about the same time I did. Now a bunch of us are working together maximize the improvements in the way Dene Languages will be typed, emailed, and displayed on the internet. Most of them know way more than I do. That snag? - solved with one email. But working together as a group of perfectionists we found a lot of other issues to resolve before we have anything to publish.

Stay tuned for updates - we're just getting started.