I know, this is old news. But I don’t usually frequent ICTA’s site, and was only alerted to the directive after following links on a news story that appeared online today on IT training given to journalists by ICTA (by the way, why must they put ‘e’ in front of everything – the journalists trained by ICTA are now called e-journalists, whatever that means).
Those of us who use Mac’s are out of luck – the Unicode download packages only work on XP, though the Directive does mention compatibility of the fonts with versions of Linux. Lirneasia’s epic discussion thread on Sinhala Unicode is pretty much the place to go to get up to speed on this vexed issue, though be warned – some of the comments don’t exactly keep to the topic.
I’d just be happy to see a time when these Sinhala fonts just work, and show posts like this one on Groundviews on any computer (including Macs) without the user having to fiddle around with the innards of their OS.
With the Unicode Sinhala fonts I could find installed on my Mac, here’s how the fonts.lk Sinhala test page looked on Firefox (on the left) and Safari (on the right). Firefox renders the fonts better, but in both cases, the Sinhala words aren’t rendered on screen / written in the same way as I would have read them in print.
Readable & generally comprehensible, yes. Accurate, no.
Update #1, 16.5.2007: Drac kindly sent me this message today:
Properly rendered Sinhala for Mac OSX has been provided for years via Xenotype Technologies.
In fact, they had a properly working renderer before Linux and Windows ever did. Unfortunately, like most things on Mac OSX, it is not free.
I had in fact seen this earlier, but to shell out 49 greenbacks for this programme sounds excessive. Don’t know of anyone in SL who uses it, but if it is all that it is made out to be, may end up buying this just to read more elegant Sinhala script on my Mac.
An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance.
I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002.
I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents.
Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs.
Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts.
I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.
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