Non-standard 8-bit fonts still in use

Don Osborn dzo at bisharat.net
Sat Apr 30 12:27:02 CDT 2016


Last October I posted about persistence of old modified/hacked 8-bit 
fonts, with an example from Mali. This is a quick follow up, with 
belated thanks to those who responded to that post on and off list, and 
a set of examples from China and Nigeria. I conclude below with some 
thoughts about what this says about dissemination of information about 
Unicode.

First, a sequel to the original example of Bambara Arial, which shows a 
really bad outcome of use of a that very non-Unicode font in a Bambara 
translation of a hand-washing poster (put out during the recent ebola 
epidemic): 
http://niamey.blogspot.com/2015/11/corrected-bambara-poster-thinking-about.html 


Second, is a number of materials for Hausa speakers learning Chinese, in 
which modified fonts were used for Hausa boko text (with hooked 
letters)  and Chinese pinyin text (with tone-marked vowels). These are 
mentioned in a pair of posts on the same blog about the growing number 
of Chinese - Hausa language materials:

  * http://niamey.blogspot.com/2016/04/sinanci-chinese-hausa-materials.html
  * http://niamey.blogspot.com/2016/04/more-on-sinanci-chinese-hausa.html

For any interested in delving deeper, there are 3 PDF documents in 
particular, apparently from the beginning of three separate 
publications. Below are shortened links to the Google cached versions 
(these show the actual characters of the PDFs, and of course have links 
to the originals):

  * 目录 Abin da Ke Ciki ("Table of contents," plus first chapter in
    elementary level text) http://is.gd/SdhRW4
  * 前言 ("Forward," plus  what is evidently a first lesson on
    conversation) http://is.gd/t124Ti
  *   说明 Gabatarwa ("Introduction," plus first lesson on pinyin)
    http://is.gd/t05cvF

Although I've previously raised questions about non-Unicode text in 
PDFs, the issue with these is not PDF encoding, but rather non-standard 
fonts used in composing documents, which must be saved as PDFs in order 
to permit sharing, since those fonts make sharing as text/wordprocessor 
documents problematic (see the Bambara example above). The PDF documents 
appear fine, and would print as intended, but the underlying text 
prevents normal searches or reuse. It appears that the non standard 
fonts in the three documents mentioned include one from Nigeria for the 
Hausa boko (which may date to the mid-1990s), and one or more from China 
for the pinyin. The Chinese hanzi text appears not to have any problems. 
Dates on these documents are not clear except for one (前言) which 
evidently was produced in 2010.

Among the replies to my post last October, was the suggestion that input 
may be a reason for people creating documents with extended Latin or 
digraphs, and thinking only of products that an be read and printed, to 
stay with old familiar 8-bit solutions. Substituting characters such 
that the key for an otherwise unused character yields a hooked letter or 
a tone-marked vowel may be seen as sufficient for their purposes and 
easier than switching to Unicode and sorting out a new keyboard system. 
Or maybe Unicode is not fully understood.

If the latter be the case, that would seem to have implications 
regarding dissemination of information about Unicode. "If you 
standardize it, they will adopt" certainly holds for industry and 
well-informed user communities (such as in open source software), but 
not necessarily for more localized initiatives. This is not to seek to 
assign blame in any way, but rather to point out what seems to be a 
persistent issue with long term costs in terms of usability of text in 
writing systems as diverse as Bambara, Hausa boko, and Chinese pinyin.

Don Osborn


On 10/15/2015 8:22 PM, Don Osborn wrote:
> I was surprised to learn of continued reference to and presumably use 
> of 8-bit fonts modified two decades ago for the extended Latin 
> alphabets of Malian languages, and wondered if anyone has similar 
> observations in other countries. Or if there have been any recent 
> studies of adoption of Unicode fonts in the place of local 8-bit fonts 
> for extended Latin (or non-Latin) in local language computing.
>
> At various times in the past I have encountered the idea that local 
> languages with extended alphabets in Africa require special fonts 
> (that region being my main geographic area of experience with 
> multilingual computing), but assumed that this notion was fading away.
>
> See my recent blog post for a quick and by no means complete 
> discussion about this topic, which of course has to do with more than 
> just the fonts themselves: 
> http://niamey.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-secret-life-of-bambara-arial.html
>
> TIA for any feedback.
>
> Don Osborn
>
>

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