There are 7 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Conlang documentation
From: Jim Henry
2a. Re: Celticity?
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
2b. Re: Celticity?
From: BPJ
3a. Re: Creating Confonts / IME
From: Daniel Nielsen
3b. Re: Creating Confonts / IME
From: Gary Shannon
3c. Re: Creating Confonts / IME
From: Miles Forster
3d. Re: Creating Confonts / IME
From: Carsten Becker
Messages
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1a. Re: Conlang documentation
Posted by: "Jim Henry" jimhenry1...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Sep 23, 2010 5:03 am ((PDT))
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 3:37 AM, Roberto Suarez Soto
<talkingxo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why not Google Docs? It's not so free-form as a wiki, but you can
> edit it without knowing HTML or CSS (though it's good if you know) and export
How good is Google Docs from the POV of the pure casual reader, who
isn't logging in to edit a document? I haven't used Google Docs just
to look at someone else's document without doing some kind of
collaborative editing very often, but my impression is that it's slow
to respond compared to a normal web page, even then.
> I'm totally against learning HTML just for writing your conlang's
> documentation, unless you're already familiar with it. And even if so, I'd
> advice against it. You can edit it with any text processor, but it's silly.
> Nowadays there are better ways to publish something on the web.
In theory there are tools that let you write HTML documents without
knowing HTML. In practice, a lot of them are badly designed and
produce invalid HTML that renders fine on some browsers, but not all
-- they pages they produce tend to break especially badly on text
browsers used by blind people and some people on low-bandwidth
connections, and even on browsers that accept the buggy HTML, there's
less consistency about how it gets rendered than with valid HTML. I
don't know what the current state of the art is, but back when I was
learning to make web pages, *all* of the WYSIWIG HTML editors I tried
or read reviews of produced invalid code to some degree. Can anyone
on the list recommend an HTML editor that consistently produces valid
code?
> You should go for something that allows you to write your stuff
> without caring for tags and attributes. At the most, I'd use a Wiki that
> allows some kind of easy Wiki syntax (like *bold*, /italics/, _underlined_,
> etc.).
I like MediaWiki; I haven't tried a lot of other wiki software other
than the buggy house wiki software at Wikispaces, which I
disrecommend. It has a WYSIWIG editor, but it's slow and unreliable
for me, and Mechtild has found it even worse on her system, barely
usable at all IIRC.
> I'd use something that renders pretty. Let's face it: not many people
> wants to read about other people's conlangs, and if it's written in plain,
> boring, black on white text without any eye candy, there is still fewer
> people that will.
Maybe. I'm not fond of black on white per se, but one can change
one's default colors to an equally high-contrast but less blindingly
bright color scheme, and the simpler one's HTML is, the more likely it
is that the user changing their colors won't break the page and make
it unreadable. For me, most of the "eye candy" people add to their
web pages makes them less readable rather than more so.
There are various tools out there that let you take a formatted ASCII
text file with markup like *asterisks for emphasis* and tab/space
formatted tables and so forth and turn them into HTML or RTF. I use a
few of home-grown tools of that sort, with special hacks to format
conlang sentence glosses, to produce my gzb web pages; some of them
are in my
http://jimhenry.conlang.org/gzb/scripts.zip
and would need a little tweaking to work with languages other than
gzb, but if anyone's interested, I'll produce a non-gzb version. A
tool more general-purpose and probably more powerful for most things
(possibly not for glossing sentences, I suspect) is ReStructured Text,
which I've heard about and plan to try but haven't yet:
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickstart.html
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (15)
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2a. Re: Celticity?
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" tsela...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Sep 23, 2010 6:18 am ((PDT))
On 23 September 2010 14:44, R A Brown <r...@carolandray.plus.com> wrote:
>
> That was the point. I could've picked a piece of Manx, I guess, or Cornish
> in one its more "unceltic" spellings (there are AFAIK 4 different main
> varieties of revived Cornish). There ain't a "Celtic orthography!"
>
>
Indeed. On this point, I've always been surprised that Breton went for _k_
for the voiceless velar plosive instead of _c_. I wonder how much was
usefulness (how many words in Breton have a /kh/ cluster?) and how much was
simply wanting to do something different from French...
> [snip]
>
>>
>> Do you think that artifacts made by people who speak a
>>> language defined as Celtic should not be called
>>> Celtic?
>>>
>>> There lies the problem. By calling artifacts made by
>> Gauls or by Irish Gaelic speakers uniformly "Celtic", one
>> creates the impression of a single common culture among
>> those people, which AFAIK didn't exist. There isn't a
>> single "Celtic" identity, no commonality between the
>> various "Celtic" folks besides related languages. the
>> various Celtic-speaking populations have always been very
>> isolated from each other (some say that even during the
>> original time Indo-Europeans arrived in Western Europe
>> and the British Isles, Q-Celtic speakers and P-Celtic
>> speakers were already separate waves of migration with no
>> contact with each other). "Celtic", in the popular
>> meaning of the word, is a very modern construction that
>> stems from a heavily romanticised view of the time when
>> the British Isles were not dominated yet by
>> Anglo-Saxons.
>>
>> As a linguistic term, "Celtic" is a handy label for an
>> Indo-European language subfamily that we know exists
>> (although the details might still be a bit hazy). As an
>> anthropological term it has no value whatsoever, and is
>> even harmful in creating an illusion of similarity and
>> continuity that just does not exist.
>>
>
> Amen! Amen!
>
> Christophe has expressed my sentiments exactly and far better than I could.
>
>
Wow! And here I was, thinking I was being very unclear, and probably not
quite correct, and fully expecting you to come in and correct my mistakes
and/or clarify my inexactitudes!
> Christophe's last paragraph is so very, very, very true!
>
>
*blush* Thanks! Having myself more than a bit of interest in Celtic
languages (if only because of how I dissected them for parts and inspiration
when I started working on Maggel -the Maggel alphabet being uncial is hardly
coincidental ;) -), I've always tried to steer away from the romantic notion
of Celticity (the whole "Celtic" -which most often seems to be Irish- vibe
can be fun, but you shouldn't take it too seriously :) ). I think I managed
(making the speakers of Maggel arrogant and *possibly* cannibal probably
helped ;P). And no one can accuse me of copying Tolkien! ;)
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (2)
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2b. Re: Celticity?
Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se
Date: Thu Sep 23, 2010 8:16 am ((PDT))
2010-09-23 15:11, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets skrev:
> Indeed. On this point, I've always been surprised that Breton went for_k_
> for the voiceless velar plosive instead of_c_. I wonder how much was
> usefulness (how many words in Breton have a/kh/ cluster?) and how much was
> simply wanting to do something different from French...
>
What surprises me is that they went for _c'h_ rather
than _kh_. To me the former looks like /kh/ and the
latter like /x/ rather than the other way around!
/bpj
Messages in this topic (2)
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3a. Re: Creating Confonts / IME
Posted by: "Daniel Nielsen" niel...@uah.edu
Date: Thu Sep 23, 2010 6:46 am ((PDT))
If I can hook onto this thread: I need something that will allow overlapping
characters, spaced by a user-defined horizontal spacing (that may be
positive or negative). That is, the characters may overlap partially as well
as fully. Hope that makes sense. Does anyone know of such a thing?
Actually, now that I think about it, I suppose one could give Latex macros
that define spacing.. hmm..
Messages in this topic (4)
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3b. Re: Creating Confonts / IME
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" fizi...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Sep 23, 2010 6:53 am ((PDT))
Here's an online font builder that I've had a lot of fun with:
http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/
It has the twin advantages of being very easy to use a completely free.
--gary
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 4:15 AM, Miles Forster <m...@plasmatix.com> wrote:
> How do you guys turn your conscripts into proper fonts? In the past I
> tried some rather clumsy things, and I'm sure there are better ways. I'm
> not talking about alphabet's though. I need to create something like an
> IME for a syllabic script (working a bit like hiragana). So I would like
> to type something like 'pra' and have the IME replace it with the
> appropriate character. Problem is, I don't know how to do that.
> (in case it makes any difference, I'm on XP)
>
Messages in this topic (4)
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3c. Re: Creating Confonts / IME
Posted by: "Miles Forster" m...@plasmatix.com
Date: Thu Sep 23, 2010 7:37 am ((PDT))
I think the best thing would be to edit a Chinese IME and change the words
and their corresponding characters, i.e. change 'ren' -> 人 to
'ʒu' -> [character in my language]...
I need about 800 characters, so a latin font won't be enough.
Someone has to have done something similar in the past. *deperate*
Messages in this topic (4)
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3d. Re: Creating Confonts / IME
Posted by: "Carsten Becker" carb...@googlemail.com
Date: Thu Sep 23, 2010 8:21 am ((PDT))
Am 23.09.2010 15:43, schrieb Daniel Nielsen:
> I need something that will allow overlapping
> characters, spaced by a user-defined horizontal spacing (that may be
> positive or negative)
>
I tried that for my own script, which as an abugida comes with loads of
diacritics. However, while positive horizontal spacing is probably not
much of a problem (just make empty characters and assign them different
widths), negative spacing is. Backward spacing worked fine in several
Windows versions of Firefox and Open Office, but does not seem to work
on Ubuntu generally in the same applications even, since its type engine
I would expect to be more standard-compliant than that of Windows, and
negative spacing is not how things are usually done. You might try to
solve the problem with kerning instead, if the script is linear
otherwise. For custom and more complex glyph assembly behaviours
Graphite is probably really the most viable solution, because the
support for OpenType still seems to leave something to be desired in
many aspects. Since you mentioned LaTeX, XeTeX is supposed to support
OpenType, so you might as well try and go that route.
Carsten
Messages in this topic (4)
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