Using OpenType to distinguish tone letters?

Anybody know whether it has been ventured to use OpenType features to parse out and then visually distinguish tone letters (as used in Romanization schemes to transcribe non-Latin languages)?

Comments

  • Kent LewKent Lew Posts: 905
    Very cool, Erin. BTW, one step further: the search-and-replace routine could likely be built into a GREP style so that the color styling happened automatically, rather than manually after the fact.
  • Erin, was this a paid gig?
  • Craig - was that actually sort of what you meant? Like, if there was a dictionary built-in that would substitute IPA symbols (or others) if it recognized a combination/word?
    Kent - That is a very good idea! I should have followed up with them and done that!! No time like the present :)  Thanks!
    Dave - Yes! So... as you may be hinting at, a fine example of how people can make money off of OpenSource development. ;) 
  • Craig EliasonCraig Eliason Posts: 1,397
    Erin - Almost what I'm talking about. But where you have presentation of tones triggered by a special series of keystrokes, I'm talking about coding that would recognize the tone letters in an existing Romanized text and sub in custom presentations of them. The underlying text would remain intact.
  • Kent LewKent Lew Posts: 905
    Craig — What kind of tone letters are you thinking about exactly? Are you talking about those encoded in U+0363–036F and U+1DD4–1DE6?

    You want a contextual routine that will somehow interpret and translate a text that doesn’t have the encoded codepoints and provide a visual substitution without converting the underlying text encoding? Doesn’t really seem like the role of a font.

    Can you provide a before-and-after example of what you envision happening?
  • John HudsonJohn Hudson Posts: 2,955
    Craig, it might help to have an illustration of what you have in mind. Are you thinking about things like pinyin tone numbering and zhuang tone letters? Are you imagining visually distinguishing the tone indicators stylistically, or replacing them with an alternative tone indicator, e.g. combining tone marks on the syllable vowel? The latter would be very complicated, because you'd need to identify the vowel in the preceding syllable, but not impossible.
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