Over the past several years I have developed Unicode standards for
numerous historical and minor
scripts of South Asia. Some of my
formally proposed encodings have been approved and are making
their way through various stages of balloting as part of the
process established by the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) —- Unicode is also known as ISO/IEC 10646 —-
while others have been formally published in the standard.
The inclusion of a script in Unicode is a major milestone. Native user and
scholarly communities await the arrival of these new encodings from
the day that I contact them —- if not for years in the making —-
and discuss my plans for developing an encoding for a particular script.
It takes nearly two years for an encoding to be published in Unicode after
being approved by both the Unicode Technical Committee and ISO’s WG2 group.
But, once a script is in Unicode the general perception of what “inclusion
in the standard” means is far removed from the reality that is
suggested by such an “inclusion”.
The disjunction between expectation and reality is truly a paradox: The
encoding of a script in Unicode does not automatically imply that it will be
supported out of the box. As is the case with other historical and minor scripts
encoded in Unicode, it is unlikely that major software houses will
rush to provide support for these scripts right away, or if they do so
at all!
If these companies do not implement support for these scripts,
users will be unable to produce documents in their writing systems
using common applications such as Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign. Users
will be unable to view websites containing text in these scripts using
Internet Explorer, Firefox, and other browsers. Moreover, typographers
wishing to design new, modern typefaces for these scripts will be hampered
because their creations will be unusable in ubiquitous platforms such as Windows.
The reason for this is that OpenType, the common font standard, is
dependent upon Microsoft’s Uniscribe rendering engine and a font will
not work in Windows until Uniscribe can handle the underlying script.
Certainly, those who use Linux systems can rely on HarfBuzz, an open
source OpenType rendering engine; but, ultimately, from a practical
perspective, Uniscribe support is important because Windows is the
most-commonly used operating system worldwide.
What good is a Unicode standard for a script if there is no way for
the general public to actually make use of it? What good is a Unicode
standard for a script if implementation of it is dependent upon the
economic cost-benefit decisions of major software companies? Although
historical and minority scripts and related linguistic ecologies may
not be profit generators, they are certainly valuable from humanist perspectives.
So, what is the reality if Microsoft, Apple, Google, and others don’t support
historical and minor scripts in their operating systems when a new
version of the Unicode standard is published… or ever? For now,
thankfully, there we can provide font solutions using the Graphite
rendering engine developed by SIL. However, Graphite fonts are not
supported in Windows and, therefore, will not work in Microsoft
Office, Internet Explorer, and other commonly-used applications.
Applications like LibreOffice and XeTeX support Graphite, but the user
base for these is limited. In the end, at least Graphite exists and
those of us who work with lesser-used writing systems owe gratitude to
SIL for having the foresight and imagination to provide a means for
rendering writing systems independent of the whims of software house.
I maintain the hope that Microsoft will continue to expand Uniscribe
in order to support all scripts in the Unicode standard. But until the
time comes when there is mandatory synchronization between releases of
the standard and implementation, we must turn to other, albeit
limited, solutions. As part of this solution, I will build Graphite
fonts for all the scripts I have brought into Unicode in order to
provide a basic level of support for these scripts in the Windows
environment, even if the range of usage is limited. I am not a
professional typopgrapher nor do I pretend to be, but such efforts are
just an extension of the work I’ve started.
But, I am an individual with limited resources and numerous
constraints. I encourage Microsoft, Apple, Google and others to meet me half way.
After all, what good is a standard if no one cares to support it?