* 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 A555 (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 nameISO Name
(#x00 NULL nil )
...
(#x00fb92 ARABIC LETTER GAF ISOLATED FORMnil )
(#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
