Comments on: Inuktitut syallabics in blogs?

By: JSandy

JSandy — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:26:51 +0000

Hi there,
I work with Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.
Im hoping you have solved this prob by now, but thought I would let you know that
the new unicode font for Inuktitut Syllabics is Pigiarniq.
–> http://www.tiro.com/syllabics/resources/syllabic_resources.html

By: davidicus

davidicus — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 23:28:08 +0000

hold on–Safari supports inuktituk? out of the box? holy cow. i suppose someday i’m going to have to add a hundred or so inuktituk characters to our Guitar Hero fonts?

By: dnorman

dnorman — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:57:43 +0000

@Qupanuaq: Thanks for the link. I’ll check it out to see what needs to be done.

@King: Long time no see! I figured it was something funky in Firefox/MacOSX text rendering. Firefox on Ubuntu works just fine.

By: King Chung Huang

King Chung Huang — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:52:04 +0000

The fonts that ship with Mac OS X are quite complete. In the specific case of Firefox on Mac OS X, the mangled text is because Firefox does not use modern text APIs on Mac OS X. This is also the reason why English text in Firefox is rendered subtlely different than most other modern Mac OS X text.

By: Qupanuaq

Qupanuaq — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:24:15 +0000

Ullukkut – Hello! You can also find some information on a website managed by the Department of Culture, Language, Elders and Youth of Nunavut – (www.gov.nu.ca/cley). Check under the Official Languages section. Hope this helps.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 01:30:34 +0000

Karl – I was updating the post just as you made this comment – turns out Safari on MacOSX appears to render Inuktituk as expected, with no additional fonts (unless some came pre-installed with MacOSX) but Firefox has issues… I’m contacting the folks at the Attavik website for more info.

By: Karl

Karl — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 01:24:24 +0000

D’Arcy,
A couple of months ago I read a book, by Robert Bringhurst (a country man of yours), “The Elements of Typographic Style”. In it he writes about the work that has been done by type designers on Inuktitut languages. William Ross Mills is mentioned having done work on representing Uqammaq and Pigiarniq. So it seems that – yes special fonts are necessary. Maybe someone else knows better, but why not contact R.B. or W.R.M., I;m sure they would both be happy to assist.

best of luck,

Karl

By: Chris L

Chris L — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:42:43 +0000

I hope it’s easier than dealing with Inupiat orthography, which has been a real pain. The characters don’t exist in any single Unicode set and then there is the problem of keyboard entry and fonts… our faculty have generally gone to live material digitized on a shared whiteboard + pdf docs (since they have the fonts and utilities) + the pidgin equivalent using latin characters that has (out of sheer necessity) evolved.