Knuth also designed METAFONT, which implements a different font description and generation language (Knuth, 1992).Īlthough the development of TeX has been frozen since Knuth has decided not to develop further TeX and METAFONT, new typesetting engines that extend TeX's capabilities are still emerging. Yet, TeX produces a device independent (DVI) file describing the text and graphic elements on a page that can be further processed to generate other page-description languages such as PostScript output. Because many people are familiar with LaTeX but do not know its relationship to TeX, they mistakenly think LaTeX and TeX are two different programs.
Leslie Lamport designed the LaTeX markup Language (Lamport, 1994) that sits on top of the TeX typesetting engine to facilitate the creation of input files. TeX processes an input file that contains both text and typesetting commands. It is a digital typesetting engine, a computer program that does the work of a typographer, describing the appearance of the printed page (Knuth, 1993). Knuth, the famous professor of computer science at Stanford University. TeX is a legendary computer program designed by Donald E. I used these features to develop a number of tools that ease the preparation of Cherokee and Inuktitut language documents. In addition, it introduces a number of features that make the lives of tool designers quite easy. This article is about Omega, a modern typesetting system based on TeX, that by default accepts Unicode text files, but is capable of handling any imaginable input encoding.
#INUKTITUT KEYBOARD LAYOUT CODE#
(Unicode provides a unique computer-readable number - called a code point - for every character this number works across platforms, programs, and languages.) A modern typesetting tool designed to handle syllabaries should allow users to type the symbols either directly (e.g., using a Unicode editor if the script is supported by the Unicode Standard, or by some editor that supports a special character set), or by using some standard Latin transcription. The same characteristics that allow Cherokee to be transcribed into the Latin alphabet allow the creation of typesetting tools for syllabaries.
Students of the Cherokee language learn a Latin transcription of the syllabary to make it easier to learn Cherokee.
Syllabaries, common in ancient scripts, were used by the Maya and the Epi-Olmec people of Mesoamerica.īecause a syllabary is less expressive than an alphabetic script, it can be transcribed in an alphabetic script without losing meaning. The Apache and the Navaho languages are among the native American languages that use a Latin alphabet, while Cherokee, Inuiktitut, and Cree are among the languages that use modern syllabaries. This paper was refereed by the Journal of Electronic Publishing's peer reviewers.Īll the native American languages spoken today are written either in some Latin alphabet, augmented with "accented" letters, or in a syllabary, a set of indivisible syllabic symbols, each of which represents a syllable.