« Richard Dawkins and Petitions to the UK Government Concerning Religion
Main
Happy New Year! »
December 31, 2006
A Font for All Those Other Letters
Dear readers, for best results when reading Ugaritic or Akkadian texts on Abnormal Interests, please download and install the Charis SIL font on your computer. I will continue using my normal font for most other abnormal posts.
One of the problems with working with Ugaritic and Akkadian and other languages where the writing system is normally transliterated into a modified Latin alphabet is the problem of what font to use. When I've posted Ugaritic, Akkadian and other epigraphic material here on Abnormal Interests I've "cheated" by using underlines and some not quite correct Cyrillic and Turkish letters in a common Unicode font. I tried to approximate what one would see if a proper font were universally available. The truth is there are several satisfactory Unicode fonts and I have used them from time to time in the various PDF files to which I have linked.
Well, yesterday Chris Heard pointed out a very good free Unicode font that does a good job at supporting most of the symbols I would like to use. I'm not too happy with a couple of the letters but it is much better than anything else out there. And if it's good enough for Chris, it's good enough for me. The font is Charis SIL and you can download it for free from the Summer Institute of Linguistics' website. Windows and Mac versions are available.
In the future, I will be using Charis SIL whenever I transliterate Ugaritic, Akkadian or any other language where transliteration is appropriate.
As a test, the following two lines contain the Ugaritic alphabet as found on the abecedary tablet KTU 5.6. The first line is in the more common lowercase and the second line is in uppercase.
ảbgḫdhwzḥṭykšlmḏnẓsʽpṣqrṯǵtỉủś
ẢBGḪDHWZḤṬYKŠLMḎNẔSʽPṢQRṮǴTỈỦŚ
If you see squares or rectangles or something else that is incorrect then the Charis SIL font is not properly installed on your computer.
Remember, for best results when reading Abnormal Interests, please download and install Charis SIL on your computer. I will find a way to remind you of this from time to time.
Posted by DuaneSmith at December 31, 2006 12:30 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://WWW.telecomtally.com/cgi-bin/blog/mt-tb.cgi/956
Comments
Post a comment
Please read Abnormal Interest's Comments Policy.