Dinka (Thuɔŋjäŋ) Unicode support
Dinka requires 4 characters that do not have precomposed forms in Unicode:
These characters are created by using a base character followed by a combining diacritic.
Ideal situation
To accurately render these characters, it is necessary to use OpenType fonts that support the positioning of diacritics relative to another character. Current fonts that are suitable for Dinka include:
It is also necessary to use an operating system or application that supports the rendering of combining diacritics with Latin script characters. On the Windows platform, there are two approaches: MIcrosoft's Unicode Script processor (Uniscribe) and SIL International's Graphite.
Uniscribe
Micrsoft introduced a version of Uniscribe that supports the contextual positioning of combining diacritics in the Microsoft Office 2003 applications, allowing these applications to display combining diacritics correctly when an appropriate OpenType font is used. An updated version of Uniscribe was released as part of Windows XP's Service Pack 2. This allows Unicode based applications that use uniscribe to correctly display combining diacritics.
Graphite
Doulos SIL 4.0 is a font that contains Graphite and OpenType font tables. A number of Graphite enabled programs have bene developed or are under development:
- WorldPad
- Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird (Windows and Linux)
- OpenOffice
An approximate solution
If you restrict yourself to using the lowercase characters of the breathy open-e and breathy open-o, there are some fonts with will display Dinka adequately, although these fonts are far from ideal in displaying the uppercase versions of these characters:
- Arial Unicode MS (this font is a licenced font and only available with certain Microsoft Office applications).
- Gentium and GentiumAlt
This approach works when using Unicode applications on older versions of Microsoft Windows.