<everson@evertype To: Ida Bagus Adi Sudewa/Indonesia/IBM@IBMID.com> cc: Rick McGowan <rick@unicode.org>, dwanders@pacbell.net
Subject: Re: The first article

11/03/2003 22:17

Hi Ida Bagus Adi Sudewa,

I received your first and third articles, but have not received the second one. I converted the first one to PDF and sent it to Rick and Debbie; I will do so with the third one as well.

You have done a lot of very good work on the script so far and it is very encouraging. So many people who want to encode scripts don't understand Unicode at all! Clearly you do understand it, and this will help tremendously.

About the budget. You said:

>About the funding, we are a privately funded foundation that is
>limited by our personal budget. Please advise us what are the costs
>that may occur for this encoding effort. If the cost is bigger than
>what we are preparing now, we may need to raise more money from
>other sources. We will try to contact the Bali Provincial Government
>for support, and the Faculty of Letters Udayana University for
>resources of linguists, existing researchs, and lontars (palm leaves
>manuscript)

As we explained, one of the reasons the Script Encoding Initiative exists is to free me from having to do other work so I can spend more than my scant spare time on script proposals. We have estimated that the amount of time I spend on revising and preparing an average proposal is worth about $2000. Obviously we understand that your budget is your own, and such an amount may not be feasible. Or it may. All I can say is that it would be a lot easier for me to work actively on encoding the Balinese script with funding than without.

Please let us know what you think.

By the way, the biggest question with regard to the encoding is easily answered: Let's use the virama model for Balinese.

Currently I am looking at some Javanese materials and am thinking about the unification question.

Some years ago a friend gave me a palm-leaf book with a bamboo cover. It seems to be about Rama and Sita, and I have always thought it was in Balinese since the letters seemed very different from Javanese letters I had seen. I've attached a 72-dpi jpg here just for interest. I think that's Garuda on the right...

Best regards, -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com/