How to use Yudit to edit Hungarian Runic text Written by: Gáspár Sinai Date: Tokyo 2002-02-25 Modified: Tokyo 2006-06-21 Important On 2002-12-07 I renamed OldHungarian.kmap to HungarianRunes.kmap. They mean the same thing rovásírás but I prefer to use Hungarian Runes. You can use yudit for rovásírás out of the box because yudit.ttf comes with rovas glyphs in PUA, so in theory you need this document only if you want to use the original rovas fonts. Introduction Hungarian Runes is the script that was used by Hungarians before Latin letters were introduced. Please see the References section for more details. Hungarian Runes support was added to Yudit to enable researchers and enthusiasts to make plain text email correspondence in mixed old Hungarian (rovasiras) and modern Hungarian. If a font is created it would even be possible to set up an utf-8 encoded web page that contains both old and new Hungarian. The PUA codes in Yudit are not a replacement to Hungarian Rovas Standard, they just let us create mixed language plain text. Yudit will always be able to use legacy Hungarian Rovas Standard fonts and texts with the built-in rovas converter. Installation Follow the instructions from http://www.yudit.org. If you have a previous installation, after unistallation of the previous version, it is advised to remove the yudit.properties file: ~/.yudit/yudit.properties Please read Remarks section to see what ~/ means here. This is an important step because yudit.ttf encoding has been changed and you may not be able to display text with it if old configuration files are lying around. 1. It is usually as simple as, ./configure make make install (as root) By default the yudit executable is installed in /usr/bin/ directory. Other files will be placed under /usr/share/yudit. 2. Download the following fonts: rovstdjb.ttf - Font for right-to-left writing rovstd.ttf - Font for left-to-right writing they were created by Dr. Hosszú Gábor. They are freely downloadable from: http://geocities.com/rovasiras/betuk/index.html Please note: yudit-2.5.4 yudit.ttf incorporated rovstd.ttf into PUA so you don't need to download them (you may skip 2,3,4). 3. Locate font directory: Windows: C:\Program Files\yudit\fonts or ~/.yudit/fonts Linux: /usr/share/yudit/fonts or ~/.yudit/fonts 4. Copy rovstd.ttf and rovstdjb.ttf to fonts directory. If you don't have an existing configuration, that came, for instance from a previous installation of yudit, you can skip steps 5 and 6. 5. Modify ~/.yudit/yudit.properties, add virtual fonts yudit.editor.fonts=default,TrueType,Misc,Rovas yudit.font.Rovas=rovstd.ttf:rovas:LR,rovstd.ttf:rovas:RL,yudit.ttf As LR glyphs are mirrored images of their RL counterparts we should to attach the LR (left-to-Right) and RL (Right-to-Left) attributes to the appropriate fonts. The encoding rovas option need to be used for the font encoding. You can omit the direction - LR direction is assumed then. The mirrored glyphs are calculated from their LR and RL counterparts if they are not specified explicitly: yudit.font.Rovas=rovstd.ttf:rovas,yudit.ttf As yudit.ttf already has rovas characters, put it to the end as a last resort font. Here are a few other font examples (some of them unnecessarily use two fonts to get the mirroring done): yudit.editor.fonts=default,TrueType,Misc,Rovas,Csenge,RovFS,RovSada,RovV1,Sumer yudit.font.Rovas=arial.ttf,rovstd.ttf:rovas yudit.font.Csenge=arial.ttf,csengejb.ttf:rovas:RL yudit.font.RovFS=arial.ttf,rov_fsjb.ttf:rovas:RL yudit.font.RovSada=arial.ttf,rovsada.ttf:rovas:LR yudit.font.RovV1=arial.ttf,rov_v1jb.ttf:rovas:RL,rov_v1.ttf:rovas:LR yudit.font.Sumer=arial.ttf,sumerjb.ttf:rovas:RL,sumer.ttf:rovas:LR Of course the simplest case is when we just use one font, yudit.ttf yudit.font.Simplest=yudit.ttf it has rovas characters in PUA. Please note that filenames are case sensitive in Linux. 6. Invoke Yudit Change font (with this configuration it is F4) Change input to HungarianRunes Small letters like o o" o: produce normal letters. Capital letter combinations like AB produce ligatures. 7. Enjoy (optional) Remarks: a) ~/ means HOME directory. This is the directory that you see when you press home button in Yudit file manager. b) In yudit file manager .yudit is not visible unless you press the "hidden" button. c) After fresh installation you need to invoke yudit and exit so that ~/.yudit/yudit.properties file gets created. This is needed only if ~/.yudit/yudit.properties is missing. Important Technical Notes Reading Dr. Hosszú Gábor's specification: http://geocities.com/rovasiras/cikkl/bevezet/bevezet.htm I decided to make the following remapping: 0xEE00..0xEE29 HUNGARIAN RUNIC LETTERS (42) 0xEE2F HUNGARIAN RUNIC PUNCTUATION (1) 0xEE30..0xEE3D HUNGARIAN RUNIC NUMBERS (6) 0xEE40..0xEEAF HUNGARIAN RUNIC LIGATURES (76) WARNING: This is the Private Use Area of Unicode. Files created will not be portable, and in the (unlikely) event that Unicode will include Hungarian Runes your files would need conversion. As of 2002-03-01 EE00-EEAF is unassigned by ConScript Unicode Registry. Please note that ConScript Unicode Registry: http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/ is an place to register PUA characters. You may want to try to get Old Hungarian registered - it would help font makers so that they would not use these characters for other purposes in fonts. Even Klingon is registered there, so you might get lucky, but personally I don't think you will succeed registering it. Unrelated information: Conscript is organized by the same people who make the official Unicode. Note that not registering may actually be even good for Old Hungarian, because, for instance, we are not forced to use ZWJ and ZWNJ zero with characters to accept ligature formation, and we will have the freedom to specify ligatures directly when we want them, and also make conversion possible with the legacy Rovas Standard. What is most important of all can use reversible algorithms that are usually not very popular at Unicode Consortium. Reversible algorithms are very useful to preserve the integrity of plain text. With the use of PUA we also have the freedom to put Old Hungarian into BMP so we can encode our emails in utf-7, as utf-7 can encode only 16 bits. Old Hungarian Unicode Proposal (dated 1998): http://wwwold.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1686/n1686.htm does not have HUNGARIAN RUNIC LETTER CLOSED E HUNGARIAN RUNIC LETTER AS HUNGARIAN RUNIC LETTER ATY All 3 of them can be used in Yudit. Conversion If text contains only Old Hungarian, conversion to/from the Hungarian Rovas Standard is possible if the file is read/written with rovas converter as a file-type. OldHungarian file-type can be used to make a transliteration of the text with the keyboard input map. Be aware that 8-bit encoding is correctly encoding the Rovas standard fonts. If Unicode encoding table is used in True Type fonts I found the following differences in rovstd.ttf, for instance: Glyph Character Format4 Format0 (8-bit) GO 0xEE58 0x0152 0x8C  HA 0xEE59 0x0178 0x9F  HI 0xEE5B 0x02DC 0x98  IT 0xEE5D 0x2026 0x85  NT 0xEE6D 0x0153 0x9C  SK 0xEE78 0x0192 0x83  UNK 0xEE84 0x2122 0x99  Yudit automatically uses 8 bit encoding when necessary so you don't need to know this subtle detail. References Dr. Hosszú Gábor http://geocities.com/rovasiras/ Heves Gábor http://fang.fa.gau.hu/~heves/ Lehoczki Endre http://www.dsuper.net/~elehoczk/ Hungarian Letters and Writing http://www2.4dcomm.com/millenia/alphabet.htm Ancient Hungarian Runic Writing http://www.interlog.com/~photodsk/magyar/rovas/rovaseng.html Rovástól Írásig (Hungarian) http://www.sztaki.hu/~smarton/erdely/rovas.htm Magyar Törzsnevek http://www2.4dcomm.com/millenia/tribe.htm