Cuneiform, and how to make the fonts "work"

[jimw wagner]

I'm using Ubuntu 6.10,and I have at least two fonts, Akkadian_1, and
BATimesAkkad, for which there are very few instructions.

For the first ones, there is a small note:

Download the first set of fonts
<http://members.aol.com/ricdum/akka1.zip>Akkadian-1.
This is a set of about 220 signs each accessible by the codes
between ALT + 0033-0255, excluding 0127 and 0160.
Unzip the file akka1.ttf and install as a new font.

However, how does one go about making this produce cuneiform signs?
There are no Readmes to go by.

I know that to type in Kazakh, for instance, I have to have my keyboard
set for Kazakhstan. There are no native keyboards for Akkadian . :-)

I can understand that this is not usually the sort of question you deal
with, but I hope you can give me a bit of help.

Thanks,

JimW

[William J Poser]

This font looks like it has a custom encoding. I used pfaedit
to inspect the font - it will show you what glyph is at what
codepoint. How to work with it depends on what you want to do.
If you are accustomed to working with Unicode tools, you could
re-encode the font to Unicode using pfaedit or some other
tool.

If you want to use it in OpenOffice.org Writer, install the font
following the instructions at: http://billposer.org/Linguistics/Computation/XFonts.html. Then, after starting up Writer, select the font and type away.
When you type "a" you will get the glyph at codepoint 0x61 and so forth.
I've put an image at: Loading Image... showing
OO Writer displaying the result of typing a-z. Of course, to use this
font extensively you'll probably want to create a keyboard mapping or
some other input mechanism.

Bill

[Simos Xenitellis]

Post by William J Poser
This font looks like it has a custom encoding. I used pfaedit
to inspect the font - it will show you what glyph is at what
codepoint. How to work with it depends on what you want to do.
If you are accustomed to working with Unicode tools, you could
re-encode the font to Unicode using pfaedit or some other
tool.
If you want to use it in OpenOffice.org Writer, install the font
following the instructions at: http://billposer.org/Linguistics/Computation/XFonts.html. Then, after starting up Writer, select the font and type away.
When you type "a" you will get the glyph at codepoint 0x61 and so forth.
I've put an image at: http://billposer.org/Hidden/akk.jpg showing
OO Writer displaying the result of typing a-z. Of course, to use this
font extensively you'll probably want to create a keyboard mapping or
some other input mechanism.

Apparently Cuneiform is available in Unicode. See
www.unicode.org/charts and specifically under the heading Ancient
Scripts.
You can indeed convert your existing fonts to Unicode by using pfaedit
(or now called FontForge) by simply cutting and pasting the glyphs to
the correct index. Cuneiform glyphs start at 0x12000.
You can then install the font as Bill describes.

In order to write with the new font, you can create a keyboard layout
that mimics the existing layout you are using.
If you use Ubuntu Linux, you need to create a keyboard layout file
in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/ for Akkadian.
The format of the file is quite simplistic.
Let's see the Khmer file, /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/kh:

// keys: `1234567890-=\
key <TLDE> { [ guillemotleft, guillemotright ] };
key <AE01> { [ 0x10017e1, exclam ] };
key <AE02> { [ 0x10017e2, 0x10017d7 ] };
key <AE03> { [ 0x10017e3, quotedbl ] };
key <AE04> { [ 0x10017e4, 0x10017db ] };
key <AE05> { [ 0x10017e5, percent ] };

The first column (key) shows the scan code of each key. It covers each
row on the physical keyboard. If you start of the Khmer file, you do not
need to figure out those scan codes.
Then, the first column in the brackets corresponds to the unicode value
of the glyph that will appear when you press the key. The second column
is the glyph that appears when you press Shift+<key>. You may want to
add a third and fourth column (if required) for Alt+<key> and Alt+Shift
+<key>.

Once you save the file, follow the instructions at
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edgy#How_to_add_keyboard_layouts_for_other_languages
to add Akkadian.

The important benefit of this is that the documents you will be writing
will follow the Unicode standard. This is cool.

Hope this helps,
Simos - http://simos.info/blog/

[William J Poser]

For re-encoding a font to Unicode using FontForge (formerly called
pfaedit), I have a little tutorial here: http://billposer.org/Linguistics/Computation/Reencoding/HowTo.html.

If you do do this, please make the re-encoding available as I'm sure
other people would like to use it.

Bill

[Simos Xenitellis]

Post by William J Poser
For re-encoding a font to Unicode using FontForge (formerly called
pfaedit), I have a little tutorial here: http://billposer.org/Linguistics/Computation/Reencoding/HowTo.html.
If you do do this, please make the re-encoding available as I'm sure
other people would like to use it.

Thanks Bill.
The guide is really useful!

Simos