Re: Ugly in ascii was: RE: Re: Introducing Paul Burgess...

En réponse à "Karapcik, Mike" <KarapcM@...>:

>
>         In the full name, the e-grave-ogonek at the end of the name
> should be schwa-ogonek (a nasalized central vowel). Can latex do that?
Of course! :)

> Are you using combining diacritics, or the Unicode vowels with the
> ogonek?
Well, TeX combined characters before anybody had had the idea of Unicode :)) .

>         Along those lines, could latex do v-ogonek?
Easy! In LaTeX you don't have limitations on what you can put diacritics on.
Want a z-ogonek-Hungarian umlaut, and you can have it :))) .

 In Tekwari, Y and V
> are vowels. V is a low, central vowel ( /6/) similar to the Mvskogee
> languages. (The schwa in Tekwari would be a tad bit higher than the
> English schwa.) While I don't think v would ever take the acute (I think
> a stressed low neutral vowel would probably turn into a schwa), it could
> become nasalized.
>
No problem for LaTeX, even if you want to put both the acute and the ogonek on
a v :) .

>         Also, the i-grave-accute-ogonek should be
> i-dotted-accute-ogonek. This could actually be a challenge.
Nope. Actually, to make an accented i or j in LaTeX, you have to use special
dotless forms of it, or else the accent is put above the dot! :)) So what you
say is actually easier than having a dotless i with accent :) .

 The accented
> lower case letters i and j in standard fonts have the dots removed for
> accented letters.
Not in LaTeX, which has the capacity to combine characters ad infinitum. It's
not for no reason that LaTeX comes with its own specific fonts :)) .

 In Tekwari, dotted-i-accute and undotted-i-accute are
> different. Can latex handle that?
As I said, it does that natively. No need for any special encoding or anything.

 When using regular Unicode, the acute
> and grave usually covers the i and j's dot.
>
Not in LaTeX which uses a different mechanism :) .

>         More importantly, is there a good online tutorial for latex? I
> think I'll have to start playing with that.....
What platform are you on? If on Windows, just download MikTeX at
http://www.miktex.org and install it. Then, when you've installed it, you'll
have on you computer the "Not-So-Short Introduction to LaTeX2e" (in
\texmf\doc\guides). If you're not on Windows, I don't know how you can get
LaTeX (on Linux it's probably already there :)) ), but the file should also be
there and with the same path (it's a standard organisation of the TeX tree).
Alternatively, just go there:
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/lshort/lshort.pdf :)) . The file has last
been last updated last Monday, so you're sure it's up-to-date ;)))) .


>         I've never actually seen a thorn-tilde in print. Could be
> interesting.
>
LaTeX can do it without a problem. Not that it will be particularly
aesthetic ;)) .

>         I wonder if latex is how Amerind language documents are done.
> Some have amazingly complex transcriptions.
>
I guess they simply have specific fonts. But if they use LaTeX they don't need
them :)) .

>         Anyway, you've sold me on Latex. Now, I have to find a free doc
> creator, and a tutorial..... Thank you thank you thank you!
>
LaTeX itself is completely and always free, whatever platform it is on. And it
contains all the guiding material you need :)) (but I am planning to make a
tutorial too, designed specifically for conlangers. But that will be after the
Metafont tutorial :))) - maybe in 2010 ;))) -). And any plain text editor is
all you need to write LaTeX files (although if you're on Windows I suggest you
download Winshell - http://www.winshell.de -. It's free, works very well for
big projects consisting of multiple files, has a nice syntax highlighting and
allows to call all the programs needed to compile LaTeX files and look at the
results by a simple click of the mouse :) - or a keyboard shortcut :)) -).

And of course, I advise you to subscribe to my LaTeX-for-Conlangers group :)))
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/latex-for-conlangers/). Whatever problem you
have with LaTeX or METAFONT, you can ask for a solution there :)) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.

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