Interesting.Stuff
Emar.Resources
Site and Excavations. A short description of the ancient site of tell Meskene and of the excavations carried on by the University of Tübingen.
Emar Bibliography. A usefull resouce manteined by B. Faist, J. Justel & J.P. Vita.
Unicode. and character sets
a plain and simple overview
Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters
by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of
different encoding systems for assigning these numbers. Anyway no single encoding could contain enough
characters: for example, the European Union alone requires several different encodings to cover
all its languages. Even for a single language like English no single encoding was adequate for
all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use.
These encoding systems also conflict with one another. That is, two encodings can use the same
number for two different characters, or use different numbers for the same character. Any given
computer needs to support many different encodings; yet whenever data is passed between different
encodings or platforms, that data always runs the risk of corruption.
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter
what the operative system, no matter what the language. This is the reason why Unicode represents a
huge help for anyone deal with linguistic and with texts in translitteration. At present
it represets the best choice for anyone wants to deal with computer-aided
analisys of ancient lenguages.
For a complete overview on the Unicode Standard see its home page of the project or the
Unicode Code Chart.
Our favourite Unicode font:
Doulos SIL
The goal for Doulos SIL was to provide a single Unicode-based font family that would contain a comprehensive inventory of glyphs needed for almost any Roman-based writing system, whether used for phonetic or orthographic needs. In addition, there is provision for other characters and symbols useful to linguists. This font makes use of state-of-the-art font technologies to support complex typographic issues, such as the need to position arbitrary combinations of base glyphs and diacritics optimally.
How to install your.fonts
Windows. installation procedure
first method: Copy the unpacked font in C:\Windows\Fonts.
second method: Press START/control panel/fonts;
after the new windows opens, click on FILE and press INSTALL NEW FONT.
Note that certain applications may not see the new font immediately.
You may have to quit and restart the application for the font to become
available.
Macintosh. installation procedure
Put the font in /Library/Fonts. That's it.
Note that certain applications may not see the new font immediately.
You may have to quit and restart the application for the font to become
available.
Linux. installation procedure
If you were so wise to use a Linux based OS, your system fully supports UTF-8 and UNICODE by default.
Anyway for a complete compatibility with this project install the Doulos Sil font.
first method: If you use a Debian based GNU/linux distribution like Ubuntu I recommend
installing the unpaked font in your ~/.fonts directory.
If you have not this folder create a new one in your Home directory and paste in the available font.
Now you need to rebuild the fonts cache by typing in a termial: sudo fc-cache -f -v.
second method: Open a terminal and type
sudo cp [FONT].ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/.
Then rebuild the fonts cache by typing in a termial: sudo fc-cache -f -v.
As for other Operative Systems probably you need to restart your applications.