My attention was recently drawn to a post by Peter Brassington at http://1000bibles.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/spell-checking-in-the-next-1000-languages/8

He lists steps for creating a simple spell check to be used in Mozilla’s Firefox Browser or Thunderbird mail client.

Who is interested in tackling this task?  Because of the complexity of Dene Language verbs, it would require an exhaustive list of all the possible paradigms for each verb.  Where could we get a start on generating such a list?  Could it be drawn from existing documents?  Who will determine if these are spelled “correctly”?

Second question, Who is using Firefox?  Would you switch to Firefox if you could have a Dene Language spell checker?  Would you switch to cloud word processors – like Word Online in Hotmail’s One Drive or Google Docs in Google Drive to compose your Dene Language documents if Firefox gave you spell check?

Does anyone know a similar method to Peter Brassington for creating custom dictionaries for Chrome (much easier to install).

I guess I’m looking to see if there is enough interest to pursue this spell check for Dene Languages possibility.

 

PWNHC language page preview

legacy to unicode converter

Rajiv’s sleek new converter

Rajiv Rawat has a sleek-looking new webpage featuring his latest conversion tools.  This iteration adds the ability to convert old Macintosh “Vowel First Dene”  documents directly to Unicode. There are new “general purpose integrated keyboards” that covers all the Dene Languages. Instead of having to click a different Unicode keyboard for each language, those who work with multiple languages can now type them all from one keyboard.  Rajiv also features a collection of free web fonts that are compatible with the Dene Languages.

Web fonts are of special interest to web page developers.  Instead of relying on the user’s computer to provide the correct fonts for displaying the Dene Language characters, webfonts reside on a server somewhere in cyberspace and are linked to the webpage using a special code that displays the characters correctly no matter which fonts are installed or missing on the viewer’s computer. (Whew, didn’t know I could pull so many pages of reading about webfonts together so concicely.  Yeah, I know, it probably sounded like a long sentence to you.)

One more thing Rajiv has added is a macro to install commonly used Aboriginal place-names to your MS Office auto-correct.  I find it very convenient not to have to change keyboards every time I need to type the word “Tłı̨chǫ” or “Behchokǫ̀”.  Just type the normal English transliteration, and the characters jump to  the correct Dene Language spelling magically when you hit the spacebar or punctuation mark.

Oh yes, where is this magic happening?
It’s a hidden page on the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre website.

DENEFONT.COM website is now ready to launch.

I’ve been giving out the URL by phone and word-of-mouth for a little while already, but now it’s official. I’ve put notices on my older sites directing traffic here. Education Culture & Employment has changed the link on their denefonts page to point here instead of my old blogger page.

Here are a couple of items I intend to fix in the next few days.  I Googled making screenshots from an iPhone.  So look for a screen image of the First Voices Chat app on the Mobile page soon.  This morning while helping a High School student use the new Unicode keyboard (on my Aurora College Windows XP computers no less) I realized that I needed to create a cheat sheet similar to my old keycaps.pdf.  (I just recently installed MS Office on my XP machines and have confirmed this does NOT upgrade Arial and Times New Roman fonts to work for Dene Languages, but it does allow Calibri and Cambria can be used.  I may try edit my stylesheet to make Calibri rather than Arial the default text area font to see if that improves the Web Keyboard behaviour even though I’m probably the only one still running XP.

Farther off is a more complete tutorial showing how to use either the lg or wm keyboards for adding diacritics.  I also need to work with Tavultesoft to improve the display of language menu choices on the web keyboard.  I am allowed 7 languages, but because I only have 4, the first one has replicated itself to fill the list.  And one of these weeks I’ll get around to borrowing some MacBooks from Mezi School to do a screencast tutorial of downloading and installing the dmg package for Unicode Dene Keyboards on OSX.

I’m liking this theme “Picolight” all except for one thing. I cannot figure out how to hide the page titles. Those large titles push my content a good way down the page without telling you much for all their size. I’d like to get rid of them and put my own page descriptions at the top, right under the menu.  I’ve tried the “Disable Title” plugin by Frank Staude, but it not only hides the title, it also removes the page title from the menu.  That’s no good.

If anyone can tell me what code to edit, or a plugin that would work with this theme, I would be most grateful.  Otherwise this site is nearing “ready to advertise” stage.

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only minutes after posting to http://wordpress.org/support/topic/hide-page-titles-in-picolight-theme I had my answer.  Thank you so much to WPyogi

I bought the domain denefont.com on Friday.  I’m in the process of building this site with WordPress.   Still too busy to sit down and learn Dreamweaver.