I just got an email from a colleague at UCalgary, posing a really interesting question. She is doing some blogging and writing with some residents of Nunavut, and needs a way to represent the Inuktitut language online.

There is a reference to Inuktitut syallabics in Unicode, but I couldn’t find any implementation details so I’m wondering if anyone has any experience dealing with Inuktitut as digital text? Can typical blogging platforms deal with it? How do you handle text input? Do you need special fonts to display it?

Update: I checked out the Attavik website a bit, from a promising-sounding link on the wikipedia page. “publishing Inuktituk on the web” – and got this page that doesn’t appear to have much in the way of content to help.

Looks promising (at least in Safari) – but Firefox/Flock show this, instead:

I’m sending a message via their “Contact Us” form to see if they can provide more implementation information.

Update: it also renders properly in Firefox 2 on Ubuntu 7.0.4