Fonts of Wisdom: do you get South Asian scripts on your screen?

@suricate
Do you have Bangla script on your Word programme Unicode list? For some reason I don't, even though I have Gujarati, Oriya, Singhalese and what have you. Or are you cutting and pasting it from another site?







Mod note: this new thread has been created with some posts taken from a thread about Indian cooking.

You guessed it! Simple copy-and-paste job from the link you've given above (and also from your earlier post, for Hindi) .

However, the uchicago link does have pointers to installation of South Asian fonts. It may be useful.

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Interesting.

I've attached a screen shot of the above 2 posts. I can see Golgar's and can't see suricate's scripts.
We have lots of these fonts included on our Macs running Snow Leopard, but perhaps not all. This happens often when others post in different scripts.


distaff

(PS sperehealfe does cook it!)

I think we need a new thread on writing non-Roman scripts on the Forum so that we can get advice from the real geeks. I usually write any text in which exotic scripts crop up as a Word ducument and copy that into my post. As I mentioned in one of these posts my version of Word doesn't have Bangla script. The word you couldn't read was in Bangla script and copied from one of the links in post #34. My version of Word doesn't have the "dotted" t (in extended Roman script as in maṭṭhā) either. This (like the "dotted" d) is indispensible when transliterating Indian words and names.

Heheh . distaff's snapshot has captured how she saw the posts. So here is mine that does show the Bangla scripts above to everyone ( perhaps, till the time all scripts work for everybody, we all should make the extra effort to post a snapshot for such exotic scripts? ).

Interestingly, it captures some other differences too, -- like how the rendering of the Hindi word maṭṭhā is different for distaff and for myself (it may be instructive to students of such scripts)!

And the different screen resolutions used!

And how the different local time-stamps are captured in the two cases. Of course, mine is the correct one!

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Curiouser and curiouser! My Word programme usually joins up the consonants properly, but in this case it doesn't. Whatever system distaff is using does that but can't read Bangla script.

Both sperehealfe and I are on Macs running Snow Leopard 10.6.8. We use Word for Mac 2004 but that doesn't enter into it - we're not posting in the scripts, just trying to see them. Our font library is from Apple and it is huge, but may not include every Indian script out there.

As far as resolution, my screen shot has nothing to do with the resolution on my new iMac (set for 1920x1080), but on the fact that I took a low quality jpeg screen shot to speed things along.

Our time stamp is for Vermont time, which is all that matters.

distaff

I'm afraid I'm growing old. Once upon a time (a little over a decade ago) I had Word 6 with a pile of "Unitype" floppy discs, each with a non-Roman font. It worked without any problems. In fact the corresponding keyboard used to appear in a separate window on the screen and made it possible to type in running text in most scripts (no Chinese and Japanese just in Kana). I have not been able to replicate that on the current version.

The first snapshot attached below was for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768. The second one had 800 x 600.

Please compare these two with the same paragraph in your post #42 (which, presumably, you see at 1920 x 1080).

Do you notice any difference?

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Even my snapshop looks shabby - on other sites screenshots of posts look much better.
This must be an IM thing since the screenshot when not posted but just looking at it on my screen looks bright and clear and big. I've noticed on the Tripcrafters? thread that all the screenshots of IM pages that folks are posting have that hazy soft focus look, again, I'm thinking it's got to do with the compression of the attachments.

Your 2 shots of my sentence, both in your one attachment do look different from each other and note they are in a different font from my original. Mine doesn't look so great either.

I've redone the screenshot using Preview on the Mac. This copy is a "better" quality resolution jpg saved at 791KB but uploaded it's about 66.3KB, any difference for you?


distaff

PS I'm going to report one of my posts here and this section of the thread to the mods and hope they can turn this into a separate thread as Golgar suggests here:

There was a similar discussion (and also very off-topic ) in another thread. See posts starting here: Prepaid taxi driver, trying to scam, or just rude?

Year before last at Durgapuja there was a gentleman selling a font program. Alas, my spouse wanted saris instead..

Like hfor2 all the typefaces for South Asian scripts are available on my mac. I just load Devnagri and Gurumukhi keyboard; for everything else there is http://quillpad.in/editor.html

Here is a link that might be useful for those wanting to write in Perso-Arabic derived scripts.

@nycank
Thanks for the link. It takes some getting used to but one gets the hang of it. At least it has Bengali "Vrinda". That's what missing from the Word programme on my hard-drive.

nyc: I was just poking around in Library and found my Fonts Collection folder. I'm not seeing something called South Asian scripts on my iMac - don't know what sperehealfe has on his MacBook Pro where I installed the entire language font folder, I was selective on the iMac.

I do have Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in my Font Collection folder.

Is this folder where you find the SA scripts? I'll probably be able to install them from my iMac install DVD. I wonder why I am able to see some but not all as shown above in my screen shots, albeit fuzzy.

I'm still running Snow Leopard and planning to stick with it for the sake of the elegance of Rosetta; what are you running?

distaff half of hfot2 (not hfor2, but who's noticing except me)