* One of my favorite Hofstadter books is: "Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (ISBN 0-465-08645-4), published by Basic Books in 1997, is a book by Douglas Hofstadter in which he explores the meaning, strengths, failings, and beauty of translation."
** "Translation between frames of reference — languages, cultures, modes of expression, or indeed between one person's thoughts and another — becomes an element in many of the same concepts Hofstadter has addressed in prior works, such as reference and self-reference, structure and function, and artificial intelligence." ** This topic correctly has been labeled "OT"; but, on the subject of translation and "modes of expression" (in the OrgMode table); this is related to the original thread/topic: "table alignment failed for Asian chars."--getting back there for a moment: *** Are there any Asian/Chinese/Tamil character sets that have fixed widths? Chinese writing is "picture writing", where characters actually represent, to varying degrees, a picture or an abstract concept of the thing they represent. **** I remember many years ago, suggesting to fellow software engineers, that they do just that: Make fixed-width Tamil character sets that will work well in EMACS. * One possibly simple "work-around" (not sure this is what you seek): Put all your non-fixed width Asian characters into cells like: "[[blahAsianCharactersOrPNGofAsianChars][A]]" ** All you'd see is an "A" and then the table will look "covered down" (in an OrgMode buffer)--but you may have to manually adjust the OrgMode table. *** Another idea: you just put something like AAAAA555 (simple PlainText--maybe the unicode string equivalent like: "U+024B62") in the table and have a program that replace the PlainText U+024B62 with the AsianChars and/or a .PNG picture file link when you click an icon/run the program. There are ELISP programs which help with inserting "glyphs" that you could use and/or extend this hash array: **** Excerptions from "unichars.el": (defvar unicode-character-list '( ;Codept Unicode name ISO Name (#x000000 "NULL" nil ) ... (#x00fb92 "ARABIC LETTER GAF ISOLATED FORM" nil ) (#x00fb93 "ARABIC LETTER GAF FINAL FORM" nil ) (#x00fb94 "ARABIC LETTER GAF INITIAL FORM" nil ) (#x00fb95 "ARABIC LETTER GAF MEDIAL FORM" nil ) (#x00fb96 "ARABIC LETTER GUEH ISOLATED FORM" nil ) ... ***** See this wonderful extension/new take on this too: http://proofgeneral.inf.ed.ac.uk/releases/ProofGeneral-3.7/x-symbol/lisp/x-symbol-unichars.el --so suggest looking at x-symbol-unichars.el, unichars.el and maybe x-symbol.el and maybe then input UNICODE "glyphs" into your table. Can you extend it to Asian/Chinese/Tamil chars? (I don't see any in the files x-symbol-unichars.el, unichars.el, x-symbol.el) *** Last idea: I've put ticker-tape .GIF files in EMACS OrgMode buffers--you could put an infinite scrolling ticker tape of AsianChars in fixed-width .GIF files with say a 16x16 pixel window (or wider) and then know a priori that the table would remain covered down--when you view it in an EMACS OrgMode buffer--regardless of what text you put in it (This is probably not what you want though--but if you are doing a presentation or tutorial of some sort and you want to show your table with scrolling notes in table cells, then it can work for you--I've done it.) You can use ImageMagick to create the .GIF files--of the scrolling Asian text. _ ElBaradei, 3 minutes ago: ١٠ شهور قبل إحالة قضية الشهيد سيد بلال للجنايات المتهم فيها ٥ من ضباط أمن الدولة هرب معظمهم الى الخارج. شئ مخزى // from Twitter for iPad [Cairo, Egypt] On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 10:25 AM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > Jambunathan wrote: >> >> Book seems like an interesting read. For me to go from frame message -> > The wikipedia page: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Douglas_Hofstadter#Inspirational >