Non-standard 8-bit fonts still in use

[Martin J. Dürst]

Hello Don,

I agree with Doug that creating a good keyboard layout is a good thing 
to do. Among the people on this list, you probably have the best 
contacts, and can help create some test layouts and see how people react.

Also, creating fonts that have the necessary coverage but are encoded in 
Unicode may help, depending on how well the necessary characters are 
supported out of the box in the OS version in use on the ground (which 
may be quite old).

Also, a conversion program will help. It shouldn't be too difficult, 
because as far as I understand, it's essentially just a few characters 
than need conversion, and it's 1 byte to multibyte. Even in a low level 
language such as C, that's just a few lines, and any of the students in 
my programming course could write that (they just wrote something 
similar as an exercise last week).

On 2016/05/01 02:27, Don Osborn wrote:
> 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.

I'm not familiar with the actual situation on the ground, which may vary 
in each place, but in general, what will convince people is not 
theoretical information, but practical tools and examples about what 
works better with Unicode (e.g.: if you do it this way, it will show 
correctly in the Web browser on your new smart phone, or if you do it 
this way, even your relative in Europe can read it without installing a 
special font,...).

Even in the developed world, where most people these days are using 
Unicode, most don't know what it is, and that's just fine, because it 
just works.

Regards,   Martin.