Presenting Irish Gaelic Font on Webpages

[Barry]

Hi all,

I'd like to implement a Gaelic tutorial with the inclusion of Gaelic
fonts. Irish Gaelic has 18 letters -

abcdefghilmnoprstu

but vowels can also take an acute accent, called a fada -

áéíóú

and consonants can take an aspiration, represented by a dot above the
letter, called a séimhiú. When Gaelic is written in Roman font, a h is
used instead, after the consonants in question – bh, ch, etc. I'd like
to use the dots if possible. The dots were officially abandoned when
typewriters came into vogue, but today there is no reason why the
traditional representation cant again be used.

I am aware that ISO-Latin-8 caters for Celtic fonts, including Irish,
but my understanding ends there -

http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~oduibhin/mearchlar/latin8.htm

If you have a quick look at the following page, you'll see that a
convenient method for entering non-English letters is provided -

http://www.studyspanish.com/accents/typing.htm

How might I implement this to include aspirations (dots), again say
for a text box?

I've looked at a number of resources online, but have found most of
them to be impractical with respect to the presentation of web pages.
Are there any practical examples out there – for other languages other
the Irish for example?

Thanks,

Barry.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

bg***@yahoo.com (Barry) wrote:

I'd like to implement a Gaelic tutorial with the inclusion of
Gaelic fonts.
You don't need to include any fonts. Forget fonts for the time being.
If it helps, think about the possibility that the document will be
spoken by a speech browser if it just gets the right _characters_.
(Unfortunately not very realistic, but a useful thought experiment.)
I am aware that ISO-Latin-8 caters for Celtic fonts, including
Irish,

No, ISO Latin 8 covers the _characters_.

If you wish to use the old orthography, then things inevitably get more
complicated, both at the authoring end and at the user end. It seems to
me that most pages in Irish use the new orthography, which can be
written in ISO Latin 1, so it's smooth sailing. For example, the page
http://www.inishowenheritage.com/gae...sh-script.html
which explains the old orthography is in ISO Latin 1 and uses images
for the old texts. It also suggests downloading an "Irish font",
presumably for use with some 8-bit encoding (such as ISO Latin 8).
This is one possibility, see
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...checklist.html

I don't think any widespread browser has builtin support for the
ISO Latin 8 encoding. But most modern browsers support utf-8, though
they may have problems with fonts - _this_ is where fonts come into the
picture, at the user side. What the user may need to do is to install
"multilingual support" or something similar. This helps with a large
number of different pages, as opposite to downloading a special font
for reading pages in a particular language.

Utf-8 would appear to be the optimal approach. You would probably need
a suitable editor, see e.g. the nice list at
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_editors.html

Alternatively you could write the document using US-Ascii only,
presenting all non-Ascii characters using entity references or
character references. This is somewhat clumsy, but manageable and does
not require any special software. I suppose you know what to do with
characters with acute accent (there are entities for them), so what you
would additionally need is a handful of numbers from e.g.
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/latin_extended_a.html

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

bg***@yahoo.com (Barry) wrote:

I'd like to implement a Gaelic tutorial with the inclusion of
Gaelic fonts.
You don't need to include any fonts. Forget fonts for the time being.
If it helps, think about the possibility that the document will be
spoken by a speech browser if it just gets the right _characters_.
(Unfortunately not very realistic, but a useful thought experiment.)

I am aware that ISO-Latin-8 caters for Celtic fonts, including
Irish,

No, ISO Latin 8 covers the _characters_.

[...]

and much other good advice that I could not improve on.

However, Gaelic is fortunate to have an expert who has not got stuck
in a backwater with proprietary font arrangements, but understands how
to do these things in the Unicode way, namely Michael Everson.

Google suggests http://www.evertype.com/celtscript/celtcode.html

But - this page is not a beginners' tutorial - one should probably (a)
read up on character representation in HTML (the most important part
being that the hon Usenaut needs to un-learn what they think they
already understand about fonts, I'm sorry to have to say) and (b)
browse around Everson's site from http://www.evertype.com/ to get the
specific Gaelic content.
Utf-8 would appear to be the optimal approach.

Seems right to me.

Good luck