Re: Symbols in HTML, was: Boreanesian in the Web

On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 09:58:16PM +0200, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
[snip]
> > Has anybody experimented with graphic images for letters used inside the
> > usual text?
>
> It works, though it doesn't look good because you can't predict the
> fonts people use in their browsers.  In most cases, the special letters
> come out in the wrong font and wrong size (sometimes even the wrong
> colour).
> But it is the only way to display non-standard special characters that
> works with just about any browser.
>
> The best way to present a conlang on the Web still is a transcription
> scheme that confines itself to the ISO Latin-1 characters.  If
[snip]

Well, I still think the best way is to typeset each line of conlang text
(or some combination thereof) into a graphic file and use that instead.
Perhaps typeset individual words into graphic files if you have a way to
automate this (don't try this by hand unless you really have nothing
better to do) -- then you can let the browser line-wrap the text for you,
and it also reduces (hopefully) the amount of graphics that must be
downloaded by the browser.

It looks a LOT better than mixing characters with graphics, since you have
full control over alignment. It also allows the conlanger to use whatever
transcription he originally envisioned rather than to be confined to use
only awkward ASCII-friendly (or browser-charset-friendly) characters. (For
example, my conlang has too many vowels than can ever be fitted into the
roman alphabet, and under the current romanization system it looks like
line-noise... can't wait till I settle on the details of the writing
system, then I'll write a little program to typeset my texts for me.)


T

--
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