Times New Roman Unicode

[MBD]

I am writing an article in Word 2007, whose style requires Times New Roman. Since that is unicode, that helps. However, my article works in Akkadian, Hebrew, and Aramaic and many characters are not yet in the Times New Roman included with word 2007. Does anybody know if these fonts are updated regularly to include new letters as they are adopted?

[Mark Eddy]

I do not know what characters you use for Akkadian, but any characters you would need for transliteration are in the Unicode Times New Roman already. The full Hebrew set of characters is also included. If you write Aramaic in modern Hebrew characters, then you are already in business. I do not know if any other characters are planned for this font.
Mark Eddy

[MBD]

Well I cannot find on Times New Roman a true aleph, ayin, tzadeh, het, or tet. Nor can I find the Akkadian H as in (w)arhum "month". Am I missing something? I have been type transliteration in my "transliterated Semitic unicode" and then trying to convert as much on the word as I can into Times New Roman. But the above letters do not convert so a word can be made up of two font types.
Michael

[Mark Eddy]

I have never tried to transliterate Akkadian, so I would not recognize the correct H if I saw it. But here is what is available (including some Cyrilic characters):
ĤĥĦħћҢңҺһ
But In the Times New Roman Unicode character map I found all 5 of the Hebrew characters which you said that you cannot find. I'll copy them here:
אעצחט
They pasted in the opposite order in which I copied them (apparently assuming that I wanted them wrapped as Hebrew). So the Hebrew, at least, should not be a problem.
Mark Eddy

[MBD]

The problem arises when I want to use Times New Roman for transliterated text; I have already been using it for Hebrew and Aramaic texts (non-transliterated). Maybe they are saving these bells and whistles until the Rapture.

[Michael Hanel]

The problem arises when I want to use Times New Roman for transliterated text; I have already been using it for Hebrew and Aramaic texts (non-transliterated). Maybe they are saving these bells and whistles until the Rapture.

I would guess that Times New Roman is way behind the curve when it comes to adopting Unicode characters. The sad thing is although Unicode was supposed to be the answer, not only is it far from fulfilling that purpose, it probably never will.

If your paper has to use Times New Roman, you may be out of luck, otherwise if you do searching, you should be able to find other Unicode fonts that have the characters you need.

[David Kummerow]

Unfortunately, most fonts do not have all the necessary characters for Semitic transliteration. Also unfortunately, the license agreement of Microsoft fonts like Times New Roman do not allow for any modification so as to include additional characters. This is why I chose an Adobe font to include the additional characters as the license agreement allows modification for personal use. These are the characters I added to Minion Pro (which comes free with Acrobat Reader) so as to support Semitic transliteration:



So what I do is now use Minion Pro as my default font. When a publisher calls for the use of Times New Roman, I use this for English text, but for transliteration I use Minion Pro.

Due to the license agreement, I'm unable to supply the modified fonts. But I can supply a program I've written to add the additional characters.

Update_MinionPro

Regards,
David.

[David Kummerow]

If you need a keyboard driver for entering such characters, here's one I wrote for this purpose (source is included if you want to modify keys etc.):

Transliteration

Regards,
David.

[Muzaffar]

Unfortunately, most fonts do not have all the necessary characters for Semitic transliteration. Also unfortunately, the license agreement of Microsoft fonts like Times New Roman do not allow for any modification so as to include additional characters. This is why I chose an Adobe font to include the additional characters as the license agreement allows modification for personal use. These are the characters I added to Minion Pro (which comes free with Acrobat Reader) so as to support Semitic transliteration:



So what I do is now use Minion Pro as my default font. When a publisher calls for the use of Times New Roman, I use this for English text, but for transliteration I use Minion Pro.

Due to the license agreement, I'm unable to supply the modified fonts. But I can supply a program I've written to add the additional characters.

Update_MinionPro

Regards,
David.

David, thanks for this, but when I try to use the updater, I receive a message: "the file is of a different size than was expected"; I am using the Minionpro fonts version 2.068

Muzaffar

[David Kummerow]

Hi Muzaffa,

This was originally coded for use with the fonts supplied with Acrobat Reader 8, ie version 2.012 of the fonts. You'll need to supply the fonts from this version of Acrobat.

Regards,
David.