Saturday, February 27, 2010

Meeting in Progress

The Unicode Dene Font tech team had a productive day in Yellowknife Feb 27. We are identifying work-arounds needed for older operating systems which are not fully compatible. We identified programs which work well with Unicode and some which still have problems. New keyboards, cosmetic improvements to character display, and language specific alphabetical sorting are in the works as a result of input from the guests which came to the first day's workshop. Three more days of workshops and trials remain.

Stay tuned for more developments and an announcement when a download package will be available.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Hopeful progress

Two days ago I began a post "While we wait for word on a funding proposal we are not idle." Before I could publish it I got the word - a portion of the funding was approved. Less than half, but enough that the tech team is planning a face to face meeting to bring together and document all the known glitches in our prototype. We have each been testing the performance in a variety of fonts, applications and operating systems. The permutations are finite, but dauntingly numerous. The unpredictability of how formatted email is received is one of our current challenges. Another challenge is deciding the degree to which we will support older, less Unicode-compliant operating systems and software.

The good news, we just may have a Unicode Dene keyboard ready for beta testing by the end of March. Keep watching. This is one of the places we'll advertise for testers.