[KS] The Mystery of the Breve

[Javier Cha]

Just to add to the discussion of typing breved (is that a word?)
vowels in Windows:

Microsoft Word (the Windows editions) allows direct input of unicode
characters through conversion from the hexadecimal number to which the
character is mapped. It is a trick that has served me well for many
years now.

The hex numbers for the vowels with breve in the MR system are:

ŏ --> 014f
Ŏ --> 014e
ŭ --> 016d
Ŭ --> 016c

To try this, open Microsoft Word; type 014f and press Alt+X. Word will
convert the hex code into the corresponding unicode character, ŏ.

Unfortunately this function is not implemented in other Windows
applications. Maybe there are third party tools that allow this kind
of input but I haven't researched yet. If you use the full version of
Outlook (not Outlook Express or Windows Mail) you can enable Word as
the email editor and use this feature.

Javier



On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Frank Hoffmann <hoffmann at koreaweb.ws> wrote:
> 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 go away within the next couple of years, as soon as old and outdated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 software and older computers have been replaced by newer script/program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 update outdated hard- and software is an individual choice.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, (...)
>
> =============================
>
>
>