Possible to add new precomposed characters for local language in Togo?

[Marcel Schneider]

On Fri, 04 Nov 2016 15:30:48 -0700, Doug Ewell wrote:

> I am seeking technical information from a Microsoft team member. 
> Hopefully we will soon have definitive answers to replace all the 
> controversy. 

For lack of anything better, and faced with Microsoftʼs one weekʼs silence, I 
now suggest to make a wider use of the Vietnamese text representation scheme 
that Microsoft implemented for Vietnamese, that is documented in TUS [1], and 
that might be of wider interest for all tone mark using languages, including 
but not limited to Ga and other languages of Togo and other countries of Africa, 
and Lithuanian:

— Vowels with diacritics that are not tone marks, e. g. 6 out of the 12 Vietnamese 
vowels as shown in Figure 7-3. of TUS 9.0 [2] are represented in NFC and entered 
either with live keys or with a dead key - live key combination;

— Tone marks are added as combining diacritics with live keys after the vowels.

Based on what I got and found, I believe that languages in Anglophone African 
countries use digraphs rather than diacritics, and that adding tone marks after 
the base letter could make for a consistent and already partially implemented [3]
worlwide standard.

Still we donʼt know why Microsoft isnʼt willing to upgrade its input framework 
for support of strings through dead keys, since Philippe Verdyʼs findings show that 
there must be a way of doing it even without upgrading to XML layout definitions…


Marcel

[1] The Unicode Standard 9.0, ch. 7 Europe-I, §7.1 Latin, sh. Vietnamese:
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode9.0.0/ch07.pdf#G19663

[2] http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode9.0.0/ch07.pdf#G17544

[3] Cf. the already cited Unified Bambara-French keyboard layout (in French):
http://www.mali-pense.net/IMG/pdf/le-clavier_francais-bambara.pdf
Linked on the Resources for Bambara Practice page of Mali-Pense (in French):
http://www.mali-pense.net/Ressources-pour-la-pratique-du.html