I have been given to understand that there is a project involving University of Wisconsin and University of Oregon concerning Yoruba fonts. Am seeking more information. Does anyone know anything about it?

Don

Last November, Samuel Olamijulo sent this question concerning new Gentium fonts to selected lists and individuals. It included a copy of an announcement by the creator of these fonts. I'm posting it all here with a question as to what kind of response there was and any further thoughts about Gentium and Yoruba. Don

---------------
Please what do you think of these new Gentium Basic and Gentium Book fonts offers in relation to still much needed enhancing of Yoruba Language Display and Storage on the INTERNET, complete with tonal signs and under dots ?
 
Thank you for your time.
Dr Samuel Kayode Olamijulo
**********************************
----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Gentium-Announce List <owner-gentiumlist@lists.sil.org>
To: Gentium-Announce <gentium-announce@lists.sil.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 6:51:51 AM
Subject: [Gentium] Update #5 - Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic available for testing

Gentium-Announce List
Update #5 - Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic available for testing
- - - - - - - -

Dear friends of Gentium,

Great news! We have been hard at work to complete the first versions of Gentium that include bold and bold italic. For the first time in many years we have a major release for you - in a preliminary test version.

We have two new font families in the Gentium clan: Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic. Each has a complete set of four weights: regular, italic, bold and bold italic. Gentium Book Basic is generally heavier than the original Gentium and better for some publishing uses. Both families also include a few OpenType and Graphite smart font features, including optimized diacritic positioning. I've appended parts of the Gentium Basic FONTLOG below to give you more detailed information on these fonts.

The new fonts are called 'Basic' because they support a smaller set of characters than the full Gentium fonts. They only support basic Latin and a handful of extended Latin characters. There is no Greek or Cyrillic, or even full IPA. The purpose is to provide early versions of the new weights that meet the needs of most Latin script users.

Never fear - we haven't abandoned the main Gentium fonts. Our next task will be to return to them and complete an update of the existing regular and italic to add extended Cyrillic, ancient Greek glyphs, Unicode 5.1 updates, and smart font capabilities. We'd hoped to have this completed by now, but wanted to get the new weights to you as soon as we could. After that we plan to expand the main Gentium family to include these new weights and smart font code.

The new Basic fonts are only available in beta test right now. They contain known bugs, so we don't yet recommend them for everyday production use, or as the source for derivative versions. The most serious one is that the lowercase 'z' has too much space in the heavier italic weights. We plan to release a fixed, final release of the Basic fonts in a month or two, once initial broad testing is done. So we welcome your bug reports and general opinions on the design of the heavier faces.

The beta test fonts are available at:

    http://scripts.sil.org/Gentium_basic

A few requests:

- please note the limitations and known problems
- please do not ask us to expand the Basic character set, as those needs will be met by the complete Gentium font family
- please report problems to me at the email address below, not via the download feedback form on the main Gentium download page

Thanks again for your interest in Gentium, and the many encouraging emails you have sent.

Victor Gaultney
Gentium /at/ sil.org

Here's part of a reply Andrew sent to Samuel's inquiry (also last Nov.):

Not all Yoruba Unicode keyboard layouts produce the same sequence of Unicode codepoints, so testing with alternative character sequences should be done,

e.g. in Unicode the letter Ọ́ can be represented as <U+004F U+0323 U+0301> (NFD), <U+004F U+0301 U+0323>, <U+1ECC U+0301> (NFC) or <U+00D3 U+0323>. These are canonically equivalent and should display the same. But it is necessary to test fonts with all combinations.

Andrew

Is there any 'text to speech software' that can read Yoruba text?

One of our associates, Dr. Tunji Odejobi of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Obafemi Awolowo University is working on Yoruba Speech Synthesis and has developed a software that works.
He is at present at University of Cork in Ireland where he will be for the next year. I shall make him aware of this demand.
Tunde

Thanks Tunde, BTW I just came across a report of a recent meeting at which you and your colleague presented about Yoruba language and ICT:

Daily Sun
"How computer can boost learning of Yoruba language and culture"
By SOLA BALOGUN
Sunday, May 25, 2008
http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/feat...-25-05-2008-001.htm

Don

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RE: Yoruba Text to Speech

Thanks Mr. Adegbola

FYI (but not light reading) - 2 articles on text to speech for Yoruba:

A modular holistic approach to prosody modelling for Standard Yorùbá speech synthesis
Computer Speech and Language
Volume 22 , Issue 1 (January 2008) table of contents
Pages 39-68
Year of Publication: 2008
ISSN:0885-2308
Authors
dtúnjí A. djbí Room 109, Computer Buildings, Computer Science and Engineering Department, báfmi Awólw` University, Ilé-If`, Nigeria
Shun Ha Sylvia Wong Computer Science, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
Anthony J. Beaumont Computer Science, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK

A fuzzy decision tree-based duration model for Standard Yorùbá text-to-speech synthesis
Source Computer Speech and Language archive
Volume 21 , Issue 2 (April 2007) table of contents
Pages 325-349
Authors
dtúnjí A. djbí Computer Science, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK and Room 109, Computer Buildings, Computer Science and Engineering Department, báfmi Awlw` University, Ilé-If`, Nigeria
Shun Ha Sylvia Wong Computer Science, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
Anthony J. Beaumont Computer Science, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK

Thanks a lot I'll check it out

Edited by author 08-02-2008 09:02 AM
Hi, re /m350 I neglected to put the URLs for the abstracts. They're on the ACM Ditital Library Portal at:

A modular holistic approach to prosody modelling for Standard Yorùbá speech synthesis
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1288084

A fuzzy decision tree-based duration model for Standard Yorùbá text-to-speech synthesis
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1221595.1221970

These are only abstracts. Apparently, one can subscribe (not free) to read the full text of the articles.

Unfortunately it looks like the ACM site is Unicode-challenged - note how some words in Yoruba seem garbled. I assume that subdot characters or combining diacritics were involved.

Microsoft's Local Language Program is working to localize Windows Vista in Yoruba.

See this story on 'Gbenga Sesan's Oro blog:
"Vista, MS Office in Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba"
Friday, December 12th, 2008
http://www.gbengasesan.com/blog/?p=307

The translation of terminology in Yoruba is available for review at:
http://www.pinigeria.org/microsoft/yorubaglossary.pdf

You can check out more information about Windows Vista Language Support in Yoruba and other languages at:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/vista/V...nguage_Support.mspx

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net