<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/