Of Mice and Keyboards
Time to be serious. This area is strictly educational, containing—at a rough estimate—95% information and 5% entertainment.
Fonts and Input
When you move past ABC into אבג and ᐱᑎᑭ, it helps to get a grip on the difference between fonts, characters and input. Or maybe you just need to know how to get your syllabic keyboard to work.
This is my explanation, complete with rudimentary historical background. Where were you in 1999?
Name that Font
You’ve read everything, and it still doesn’t work. Let’s see what your browser, in collusion with the website designer, is doing behind the scenes.
And as long as we’re here, maybe we can find out what some of those names mean.
Legacy Fonts
Here are the UCAS legacy fonts in every excruciating detail: Prosyl, Nunacom, Naamajut and AiPaiNunavik, with a detour to Aujaq. With keyboard layouts and more than you ever wanted to know about long vowels.
Long Vowels
More about AUJAQ
Naamajut and the Mac Keyboard
Flex your Typographic Muscles
A quick test to see how many UCAS fonts you’ve got installed. At last count, I had fifteen—including some too obscure to be listed here. And a few legacy fonts just to round things out.
ᐱ pi ᑎ ti ᑭ ki
Stop squinting at those teeny little thumbnails. Here’s a full-page chart of the UCAS syllabary for your viewing pleasure.
SuperGreek Rides Again (English)
o(r)
La Rinascita di SuperGreek (italiano)
You can’t keep a good keyboard down. For everyone who ever learned
if j + a = ἀ and v + a = ά, then [ + a = ἄ
and never managed to unlearn it, I give you . . . SuperGreek for the Intel iMac. Also in Italian!
You might also be interested in . . .
I’ve Got a Right to See the Blues
The unofficial transcript of the first session of the Nunavut Legislative Assembly, in parallel: English, Roman Inuktitut and syllabics.
Our Nunacom, Our Selves
Essays from the classic Nunavut ’99 collection, transcoded from Nunacom into Unicode syllabics.