[KS] The Mystery of the Breve

[Frank Hoffmann]

Dear Brother Anthony, and others:

Sorry to be so direct, but I feel that THIS should really not anymore  
be one of the points to be discussed on the  
transcription/transliteration issue.

It was done before, but here again the technical basics:

(a) First, the problems listed (mostly limited for non-informed users)  
will go away within the next couple of years, as soon as old and  
outdated software and older computers have been replaced by newer  
script/program versions (of message boards, email software, etc.) and  
operating systems (such as Mac OS X or Windows XP and later). Of  
course, when to replace or update outdated hard- and software is an  
individual choice.

(b) As was pointed out on this list before (by myself and others), the  
"new" (that is 1990s) Unicode fonts that are now standard for Windows  
(starting, I believe, with Windows 2000 or XP, and with Mac OS 9) all  
include brèves as well as Hanja, Han'gŭl, Hiragana, Arabic, Hebrew,  
Tibetan, Bengali, and the alphabets and scripts of many other world  
languages. Just look it up in the Wikipedia:  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode or visit the Unicode home page:  
http://unicode.org
... QUOTE: "Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 100,000 characters"
All these characters are in each of the standard new fonts you use --  
say Arial, Times, Palatino, or Courier. However, all of us have most  
likely still other older pre-Unicode fonts installed on our computers,  
and only if you now reformat some text you got from someone else using  
an Unicode font (or reverse), only then will you run into trouble.

(c) You stated that in a Mac environment it is especially difficult to  
type the brèves. Well, it is not. With an US-English keyboard layout  
(you can freely choose the keyboard layout in the Mac preferences)  
this is what you type (might vary according to chosen keyboard layout):

McCune-R :
   ŏ --> ALT + b, then o
   Ŏ --> ALT + b, then SHIFT + o
   ŭ --> ALT + b, then u
   Ŭ --> ALT + b, then SHIFT + u

Hepburn:
   ō --> ALT + a, then o
   Ō --> ALT + a, then SHIFT + o
   ū --> ALT + a, then u
   Ū --> ALT + a, then SHIFT +


(d) Web pages using brèves (or any other characters present in Unicode  
fonts, such as Han'gŭl or Chinese Characters): all that the web  
designer needs to do to make this work for ALL newer web browsers  
under any OS is to use UTF-8 encoding -- this is done by inserting  
this line in the header:
"charset=UTF-8" (instead of, for example, "charset=iso-8859-1" for  
standard older Latin encoding). The problem that Mac users sometimes  
have is that websites in Korean language are often encoded in national  
Korean codes (a problem you see with many Han'gŭl sites), not using  
Unicode character sets either but Windows-only fonts -- and THIS is  
rather a problem created by the 'ignorance' of the makers of these  
websites, one that will for sure also disappear rather sooner than  
later. The latest version of the Mac Safari browser, by the way, deals  
quite well with most of these strange setups (not so Firefox).


Best wishes,
Frank


========= q u o t e =========
(...)
In addition, we know that any email, blog, or web page into which we  
have inserted such a special character will more often than not (more  
than 50% of the time,  I am told) fail to work when viewed on another  
computer, even using the same browser; the special characters will  
usually be seen as ? or as some kind of blob. Moreover, the text of a  
500-page book composed on a PC using (say) MSWord, into which we have  
carefully inserted breved characters as above, once it has been sent  
to the editor or printer (not only in the US) will usually be  
transported into a Mac environment. Each breved character, to say  
nothing of apostrophes and the dashes if not hyphens, disappears and  
someone has to go through the entire text, looking at a printout of  
the original,  re-inserting the breved characters etc (which is said  
to be especially tricky on a Mac, I don't know). It is also not  
possible to use the MSWord 'search and replace' function to introduce  
as 'replace' a word with a breved letter.

So my question is: in the light of this set of problems with breved  
letters, which are with us every day and will not be going away any  
time soon, (...)

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