Seeing the Heiltsuk orthography from font encoding through to Unicode: A case study using convertextract - HAL-SHS - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société
Book Sections Year : 2018

Seeing the Heiltsuk orthography from font encoding through to Unicode: A case study using convertextract

Aidan Pine
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 1086508
Mark Turin
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 1008798

Abstract

Across the world’s languages and cultures, most writing systems predate the use of computers. In the early years of ICT, standards and protocols for encoding and rendering the majority of the world’s writing systems were not in place. The opportunity to deploy less commonly used orthographies in cross-platform digital contexts has steadily increased since Unicode became the most widely used encoding on the web in late 2007 (Davis, 2008). But what happens to resources that were developed before Unicode standards became widespread? While many tools have been created to address this problem and other issues related to transliteration and character level substitutions, this paper describes the process undertaken for the Indigenous and endangered Heiltsuk (Wakashan) language, and outlines a tool (Convertextract) that was designed to convert not only plain text, but also Microsoft Office (pptx, xlsx, docx) documents with the goals of updating and upgrading pre-existing digital textual resources to Unicode standards, and thus preserving the knowledge they contain for both the present and the future.
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Dates and versions

halshs-03083363 , version 1 (19-12-2020)

Identifiers

  • HAL Id : halshs-03083363 , version 1

Cite

Aidan Pine, Mark Turin. Seeing the Heiltsuk orthography from font encoding through to Unicode: A case study using convertextract. Claudia Soria; Laurent Besacier; Laurette Pretorius. Proceedings of the LREC 2018 Workshop “CCURL 2018 – Sustaining knowledge diversity in the digital age”, European Language Resources Association, pp.27-30, 2018, 979-10-95546-22-1. ⟨halshs-03083363⟩
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