Conversion from legacy fonts to Unicode
It is possible to convert fonts from legacy 8-bit encodings to Unicode (in effect re-encoding the old font as a Unicode font). It is also possible to convert existing text/data in a legacy font to Unicode.
Re-encoding fonts
An explanation of how to convert fonts using FontForge? - http://fontforge.github.io/ - is given at http://billposer.org/Linguistics/Computation/Reencoding/HowTo.html (instructions reference older version of FontForge)
SIL has two products for converting fonts to Unicode:
- TECkit, a Text Encoding Conversion toolkit (latest version 7 April 2008) - http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=TECkitIntro
- SILConverters 4.0, "tools through which you can change the encoding, font, and/or script of text" in a variety of document formats - http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=EncCnvtrs
Converting data/documents
The conversion of documents is a more involved process. Several years ago, RIFAL undertook a project in several African countries to develop programs to do this. (need more info]
SIL also had its own conversion effort. They have an extensive list of mapping files for converting data originally in their legacy fonts to Unicode at http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=MappingFiles&highlight=mali#dd2d9af0
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