Topic About Lobiri

Dear Doug,

FIrst let me congratulate you for this achievementin in bringing togother most the language s under one roof. It's very useful. Keep up the good work. My comment relates to the Lobiri font that does not appear on the list. As far as I know the Lobiri font has been processed already in Unicode. Do you have any plan to submit this to the authorities in order to have a harmonize set of keyboard to be used in the country?

Sincerely

Samy Tioye

Dear Samy:

Your post may have been misdirected; I just noticed it in connection with the keyboard that I created. It seems rather to be something that the Tavultesoft developers should answer. But, let me add a few suggestions that may be helpful to you or others reading this thread.

I don't know if my keyboard would be suitable for Lobiri; you'll have to look at the list of characters supported by it to see if it has everything you need.

Even if it does have the characters you need, you may want to consider having a special keyboard built that just serves Lobiri and perhaps related languages; my keyboard is intended for linguists who need to type a wide range of languages in one common system. For people who only need to type one or two languages, they are often better served by a special keyboard that includes only the characters they need.

If you want to design such a keyboard yourself, using Keyman Developer, I'm sure that Tavultesoft would be happy to distribute your keyboard.

Once such a keyboard was publicly available, then government authorities may choose to endorse it, although I would recommend against doing so. Keyboards are a very personal matter, and different people may prefer different keyboards. Besides, it really doesn't matter what keys people press to type the language; the important thing is that everyone use the same set of symbols and that those symbols are represented in the computer using Unicode. Those are the things that a government should mandate, if they are going to mandate anything.

Albert Bickford