 Welcome to earth population 7.6 billion about and you're all included in that so This will mostly be me talking but a little bit of interaction with you because You're part of that 7.6 billion and I Need some information from you too So first writing systems of the world That's simple enough. This is the world. We're talking about earth here. We are but I should specify in this case In the digital age because that's what we're really concerned with today How the writing systems of the world are represented in computing and as you all know as you use computers and phones today It works fine for probably most of us for all of us for most of our scripts But a lot of the writing systems of the world Have a lot of problems and that's what I want to talk about today so What the box box box box is going on If you don't know what this is then i'm not sure Where you've been with type because this shows up Quite a bit, especially if you're designing type you'll see it Well, I saw earlier in the future fonts logo. It's right there the not death glyph in a font which tells you I can't display this information. I don't have this information but to me If i'm trying to look at a website That's in a different language, maybe And I see this it's Well, I don't have the letters. Don't you have the letters? I thought they were in here This is I paid three thousand dollars for this laptop and you're telling me the letters aren't in here Come on So part of this joke, of course, you can substitute your own four letter word But it's really not about the word. It's about the lack of information here and I look at this a lot and I wonder about The state of technology today we have amazing technology We can shoot rockets into space Super cool. We can shoot a car into space. Maybe not so useful, but Definitely impressive the technology the thought that goes into this the money the hardware the software Everything leading up to being able to do something like this is impressive We can build robots that build cars that drive us Well, not quite yet with the self-driving cars, but You see something like this is quite impressive We can build amazing buildings like this way taller way more impressive than I don't know Centuries before and they keep getting taller and taller and more crazy on the other side of the size spectrum we have Computing like this so much computing power Packed into a small Logic board like this. This is just like this laptop here a macbook pro mother board Your phones have something even smaller also incredibly powerful So We have all this power. We have all this technology all this crazy ideas Yet I go to twitter And I get boxes And I have to think well Why why do I have boxes in this case? I have the font because we made the font so why is it not showing up That's a software issue In this case it shows up. I go to another device on this device. Okay It's mangled. You can see on the left there. It's letters are overlapping Well, is that close enough? I don't know. Is that better than boxes? Not really. I don't think that's a Decision that we need to make We shouldn't have either one of these So Before we look at some of these issues Uh, I think we should look at some of the writing systems of the world See if this works So this is going to go kind of fast, but Just Check it out. If you see something you love yell out So a script does not exist alone. It's not something that we just see. It's not art or abstract art In paul's talk earlier this morning. He mentioned the era gill quote That letters are not Things they're picture or they're not pictures of things. They're things, right? But I think it's a lot more than that letters are an extension of humans It's a living breathing extension of humans Even a lot of these scripts you're seeing right now They're dead. They've been dead. They're ancient scripts historic scripts But here they are. So are they dead? They're still here. We're looking at them. We're still talking about them We're still encoding them in unicode We're still Looking for more information. They're historians always searching searching for more So I think they're just as much alive as other scripts But a script happens for a reason Maybe not always the same reason or the same goal, but they don't just pop into existence out of nowhere It's kind of strange to think about because We're all born into a specific script or in some cases, maybe more than one I know a lot of people here were born into different writing systems such as Armenian, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Hebrew Did I miss anybody? Cyrillic anybody else Okay, there's a lot more than that though as you can see right now But I assume a lot of us here were born into the latin script. We grow up learning it using it We're surrounded by it. It's not much reason for us to think about. Oh, where did this come from or why? Of course at a type convention like this. It's uh, we're all into type We're all into the history of type and where it came from, but we can't really know for sure where it all came from we have theories about how writing came to be as a tool of administration accounting religious purposes but we don't have 100 accurate real answers We don't really know but in any case for many of the 7.6 billion people on in the world The script is it is tied to their identity A lot of people especially minority peoples A script for them is much more than just a tool to write with and communicate with It's real. It's a real huge part of their identity Which I think just saying that might not be Uh, the most impressive we should give an example. So You'll see in a minute some images from both chakma and noirie which are Scripts from parts of Bangladesh and Nepal But I've been in touch with two people from both of these communities For them, this is very important to them Bavuti who is a chakma person Part of a minority group that existed before the era became Bangladesh They speak chakma But for years they've been forced to use And learn Bengali script And this is a story that's repeated again and again throughout history all over the world Of course, it's in the interest of the colonizers the conquerors the majority people to suppress or erase the identity of the minority peoples But getting into those topics is a little out of the scope of this presentation But I think it's very important to consider when we look at the current state of World scripts and how they're represented in computing. So for someone like Bavuti Chakma chakma script and chakma language is important to him It's part of his identity and if he can't use it on the computer Then he's he doesn't feel like he can be you know fully himself in this world today Being able to use it is a way to affirm a cultural identity to connect to his own history so Is that it with the scripts anybody count how many we saw? a lot So that was 143 scripts Or well, I left one out, but did anybody notice which one? Latin yeah, I'm not so interested in latin script But you saw that on all 143 slides because that was the title I put for each script And those names also were the unicode names Which aren't always the best names ever, but that's one way to identify those scripts So there's also another 120 or so waiting to be encoded Maybe more There's a lot of scripts in the world So let's look at some of the problems That we see in computing today We don't have a lot of time to get into details about all of these But I think being aware of each one of these is The first step The first problem is no fonts We have the question of do we have too many fonts that comes up a lot, right? Do we have too many fonts already? Do we really need more fonts? Well for Most of these scripts that we just looked at We need at least one font like Some of them have close to zero or Maybe a couple maybe some hacked fonts that because there's no support for unicode or open type yet So people hack their fonts somehow ASCII encoding. They do all kinds of things which Really doesn't work so well, but you know, it's a way to Do something better than nothing But when we have no fonts We get something like this in this case. It's a boxes without the X or the question mark or There's lots of variations in the not deaf glyph Looking at pages like this is kind of interesting because it's a little abstract box art Here's another one Which is this one I think is noori script. I believe you can see on the top. There's some devanagari text which is Also used for the napali languages But like what I just mentioned with the chakma These people were forced to use the devanagari script and so You see some of those letters, but not the noori This one is uh Well, it should be unico which is an african west african script and Again no font installed on my system Here's a good search for Search for some unico Images see the thumbnails have a little bit There you can see the script that's in an image But I see again at the top question boxes boxes More boxes in the search But I like this font here in the image. That's a good one But we could look at boxes all day So many boxes to be found on the internet but uh That's the first problem no fonts But what about if we do have fonts and the user or the software Doesn't quite get it right This is one that you'll see a lot for arabic Arabic is probably the most widespread mangled text that I I don't know if there's anything else that compares It's really not that difficult to shape the text correctly But users don't know in this case you can see at the top and well the bottom is upside down But at the top It's just individual letters This one you get the right direction. It should be right to left. That's correct, but nothing is joined correctly Same at the bottom So this tells me the software didn't do it correctly in the first place And or the user didn't know what they were doing. They didn't check That's the first problem is not checking And I pulled a couple images from a great blog by uh ramsey nasser in new york He has a blog. Nope not arabic on tumblr And people can send in all kinds of submissions like this You'll find every possible variation of how to mangle the arabic script On this this particular poster you see the french is good the english is good. There's some chinese on there It's all good, but the arabic text. Well, it's arabic letters But you can't consider that arabic text. It's just Not put together Here's a couple more simple examples Welcome one word very simple They got the direction right again, but Not the joining so Not not arabic Same on the left So this happens a lot I got this in the mail For insurance company They gave me this You can call these numbers if you speak this language and you need help Most of them are fine like The greek italian anything with the latin script the greek the russian But here we've got two examples arabic again Just individual letters Not arabic and below that the first one that I noticed because I work on chimere quite a bit it's completely mangled because It's not shaped at all if you don't know chimere This is one thing or if you don't know any of these Scripts you don't have to yet, but now you're seeing them so Be aware if you see this dotted circle if you it's hard. I don't have a Pointer, but you can see dotted circle in the middle the chimere is the third one down If you ever see a circle made out of dots There's probably something wrong If you ever see a plus sign below a letter, there's probably something wrong In the chimere you can see the first one on the left. There's a plus sign below that means That's not right That means something here. That's the way the rendering system tells you this is wrong so Just be aware that's the Main point I want to make here is if you ever come across anything like this Oh arabic text chimere text any other script that you aren't familiar with It's easy to ask That's really easy these days. We're so connected you can Tweet you can post things on instagram. You can Get in touch with somebody who knows and make sure that you get it right So you don't end up with embarrassing things like these and The last problem that I see All day every day Lately is We have the fonts because we're making the fonts. I've been working on the noto The google noto project for the last three years or so Where we're making fonts for everything in unicode Which takes a lot of time and effort but All the systems don't quite support them yet. So again this one that we looked at Works on some systems doesn't work on other systems So we need to get in touch with everybody. I talked to People at microsoft apple well ned is ned here. I think ned from apple is awesome and We talked to them and say hey, this is not working and it's A lot of times it's because we've never seen this before we've never seen the script There's never been a font. So we need we need more people. We need more eyes on this. We need More fonts to test with But seeing something like this We shouldn't have to have disclaimers for basic text This guy Who's in nipal? he's a proponent of nipali scripts like The noori script. It's that's his script But he's been forced to use the devanagari script and he's trying really hard to design fonts and give calligraphy workshops and show people The scripts that they have tied to their identity tied to their history And he was excited to tweet this And first we had the font and he said oh great. How can I How can I write with it? And I said oh well, we need a keyboard So we made him a keyboard and then he said oh great and then he started typing he tweeted and He gets boxes. There's a bug up here And That's not good, but we shouldn't have to have disclaimers like oh you can look at this text but only if you're on a mac with Firefox and only if you're it's tuesday and it's not raining and it's it's like why why should we have to do that? This is basic text. This is simple things like Hey, I'm tweeting or it's it's nothing crazy going on Here's another example of broken rendering which I circled some of the problems on this page, but there's a About a hundred more And this one you also see the dotted circles on some of the letters you see the plus sign on the second to last row If you see those again, if you ever see those probably something's wrong So check it out and this one I thought we had all fixed last week Again, we ran into a problem and the last thing is maybe some of you have seen this just a simple sequence of characters in telugu script and another indian script This one was crashing the iphone Which sounds kind of crazy because it's just text, right? It's just simple text. This is basically like typing Hi, hi mom and it crashes your phone right like that shouldn't happen And shaping text it's not really that difficult if you think about it. Here's a simple diagram of one particular This this one I could step any of you through pretty quickly because there's not that many little circles to show you This one a little more complicated but There are people who are doing this people who know this people who are taking care of these issues So you don't have to worry about that unless you're excited about this then come on in join us So what can you do? That's the first thing be aware Now you are aware now you've seen 143 different scripts. Maybe you hadn't seen them before maybe you had But be aware be curious be interested if you see something say something Just get involved We we need more people looking at these things doing more with these scripts designing looking being excited so That's it. Thank you