On 1 Oct 2005, at 17:46, Bart Alberti wrote: > I agree. LaTeX is well worth learning and learning well (it produces > exquisite matter). After all, you are a student of linguistics. You > started somewhere, didn't you? You mastered the IPA symbols and their > use and pronunciation which is more than I can do who barely speak my > own (English-American) language well. You need a TEXT, yes! Study it!
It ain't gonna work. I did have TeX and LaTeX installed at one time. Couldn't even figure out how to launch either one of them, let alone use them. And I have perused texts at Powell's Technical Books about them. The texts will not suffice. In my linguistics classes I could never learn the subject just from the textbook. Once the prof has explained the subject in a lecture and there has been a class discussion of it, only then does the textbook finally start to make sense. You guys ascribe to me far more ability with computers than I have. And even if I could do it, why spend the time it would take? Scribus I can already handle with a negligible learning curve. All I need is a usable OpenType font with all the IPA characters as well as cool DTP characters. Fonts I have some rudimentary understanding of. I even used Fontographer to make personal changes to fonts once a long time ago. Frankly, it would be less work to buy Fontlab and make the font I need than to learn TeX. Plus, I must repeat myself, even if I learned TeX, it does not do anything for the other half of my goal -- to make available an open source DTP + IPA font that ALL linguistics students can use.
