New on the OG(H)AM website. Fascinating monthly blog by @andubhghailleach.bsky.social about the "Future of Digital Ogam": how can Unicode update its ogham block to facilitate its usage for research about the script? What can we learn from hieroglyphs for ogham? ogham.glasgow.ac.uk/index.php/20... - ThreadSky

davidstifter.bsky.social • 310 days ago

New on the OG(H)AM website.
Fascinating monthly blog by @andubhghailleach.bsky.social about the "Future of Digital Ogam": how can Unicode update its ogham block to facilitate its usage for research about the script? What can we learn from hieroglyphs for ogham?
https://ogham.glasgow.ac.uk/index.php/2024/04/24/the-future-of-digital-ogam-potential-updates-to-the-unicode-ogham-block-to-facilitate-modern-usage/

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davidstifter.bsky.social•310 days ago

@dhaydenceltic.bsky.social @3dgroovanstones.bsky.social @ndefaoite.bsky.social @trishaoconnor88.bsky.social @lexiconleponticum.bsky.social @morantango.bsky.social

akerbeltz.bsky.social•309 days ago

2/2 which doesn't exist as a precomposed character, so you EITHER have to use ą and add ´ OR you use á and add the combinint ogonek ◌̨̨ BOTH of which used to look dreadful in most fonts, especially with į́ where stuff just doesn't join up right. A lot of this could be fixed by a custom Ogham font.

akerbeltz.bsky.social•309 days ago

1/2 Mmmm the combining diacritics though, that's not down to Unicode, that's a font rendering issue i.e. Unicode (AFAIK) provides the code points but that doesn't automatically mean that it'll look pretty in a given font. @babelstone.bsky.social? Navajo is a good example, you get characters like ą́

babelstone.co.uk•309 days ago

I think there is a good case for encoding a few additional ogham letters peculiar to Scottish inscriptions, but I think most or all of the issues raised in the blog post can be solved at the font level.

andubhghailleach.bsky.social•308 days ago

Just because something can possibly be solved at the font level, doesn’t mean that’s the correct way to do it. See previous suggestions to Unicode that ogham space mark should be white space because the stem line could be added by fonts.

babelstone.co.uk•309 days ago

ᚏ + ᚋ = ᚏᚋ can be solved at the font level with the use of ZWJ to ligate ᚏ and ᚋ

andubhghailleach.bsky.social•308 days ago

Definitely not. ᚏ and ᚋ are different letter characters. Even with a zero width joiner, this would still read the equivalent of RM. That’s just incorrect. It would be like typing two v’s and calling it a w. Visually, it might look close enough, but it wouldn’t work for e.g. in a hyperlink.

akerbeltz.bsky.social•306 days ago

And in any case, that would only end up in a hyperlink if one was very lazy and autoconverted a file name written in Ogham into a hyperlink. If you do the URL manually, you don't have to call it RM

akerbeltz.bsky.social•306 days ago

But that would only become a usability issue if you had an ogam screenreader and that's just not happening. Which means that either for reading in an online/print document even if the code technically read RM, to human eyes the difference wouldn't be visible. Nobody reads hyperlinks to that extent.

babelstone.co.uk•307 days ago

I think it is a reasonable and acceptable solution for representing a rarely-attested defective character form, and better than encoding a combining stroke (or four combining strokes), which almost certainly would not be accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee

akerbeltz.bsky.social•309 days ago

That's a zero width joiner, right? 👍

babelstone.co.uk•309 days ago

The Unicode Standard is perfectly correct to specify that ogham text *should* be rendered left-to-right, but that does not mean you cannot override the default directionality of ogham text using bidirectional control characters, with a font that supports OpenType rtla and rtlm features.

marnanel.bsky.social•293 days ago

Tagging @evertype.bsky.social on this

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