The ZRCola Input System for Linguistic Usage in Program Word

Abstract

The ZRCola input system was developed at the Seien tific Research Cen tre S AS A in Ljubljana and is design ed to meet N the needs of linguists, especially of dialectologists. It is used with & Microsoft Word under the Windows operating system. Based on the Unicode Standard, the input system includes approximately 1,400 additional characters - among those are historical Slovene characters from the first half of the 19 th century - in the 00 ZRCola font within the private use area of this standard. The input of complex characters is done in canonical stack: first the user selects the base character, then adds screen diacritical marks, and finally the application combines these strings of various marks into individual characters or glyphs on user's command. With the use of a customized keyboard, which is part of the input system, this method enables simple input of texts in Latin and Slavic Cyrillic alphabets as well as it simplifies computerized search within these texts. In this way the data exchange is also much easier and the organization of data files is more reliable.