digital text Archives

Celebrating “Zero to Digital”

January 21, 2020 || Julie Anderson

Categories: Language and Linguistics, News

Tags: digital communication, digital infrastructure, digital text, font, glyph, Indigenous Languages: Zero to Digital, International Year of Indigenous Languages, keyboard, ligature, Translation Commons, under-resourced languages, Unicode

In 2019, Translations Commons published “Indigenous Languages: Zero to Digital”, a guide to creating digital infrastructure for indigenous communities. Using flowcharts and clear instructions, it explains how to create every level of the technology stack required to make a language usable online. This easy-to-understand and ground-breaking resource was co-authored with several partners in language and […]

Democratizing Web Fonts

July 11, 2019 || David Kamholz

Categories: News, Palm Leaves

Tags: digital text, Hanifi Rohingya script, Internet Archive, Noto fonts, Noto Sans Hanifi Rohingya font, scripts, Unicode, web fonts, writing systems

Of the world’s 7,000 languages, approximately half have some kind of writing system. Enabling digital support for all of these writing systems is a monumental undertaking. The Unicode standard has encoded 151 scripts—alphabets, syllabaries, and so on—as of the latest version. These include everything from common alphabets like Latin and Cyrillic to Han characters (used […]