Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.

I'm some messages behind, so this may already have been
answered more thoroughly than here.

On Wed, 16 Nov 2005, 03:19 CET, Kit La Touche wrote:

 > strictly speaking, i think LaTeX doesn't use truetype
 > fonts, but its  own CM metric, which comes with a LaTeX
 > installation.  this is the T1  encoding that one uses
 > generally.  i, for conlanging, tend to use OT  encoding,
 > which requires some poking at to get working nicely, but
 > it  handles characters like edths and angmas nicely.

LaTeX can handle TTF files these days, though you need to
create tfm (?) files and such so that LaTeX knows about the
encoding. Google is your friend. I've got a tutorial
somewhere on some CD which worked nicely. I search it if
you like.

 > i love LaTeX, but if you want fine-tuned control over the
 > layout,  it's probably not what you want.  if you want
 > consistent and nice  layout, and really good accented
 > characters, it's for you.

It's very nice for conlanging since LaTeX does not restrict
you in placing diacritics. Though I don't know whether all
diacritics from Unicode are available -- you know, the ones
from U+0300 to U+0341 called "Combining accents". I wouldn't
be surprised to hear that Unicode input is possible.

Personally, I find OpenOffice much easier when it comes to
WYSIWYG due to looking up stuff all the time in LaTeX.
But then, LaTeX for example allows you to create PDFs even
with clickable table of contents in the sidebar and other
nice stuff that you can't do neither with Word nor with
OOo. Another advantage of LaTeX is its flexibility.

However, try it and see yourself. There's MikTeX for Windows.
I however am using OOo 2.0 at the moment and am quite happy
with it -- I'm not so much a typography fetishist, except
sometimes ... Why can't one simply save at least the bodies
of texts as .tex from OOo? Should be basically possible
since OOo uses XML and XMLS to save data. A simple XSLT
should do actually.

Tristan: Have you tried 300dpi TIFF files? I've never tried
to include images into LaTeX in the one year that I used it,
but you need at least 300dpi to make pictures look not
pixeled in PDF readers. The printing industry uses 300dpi as
standard resolution for pictures. For desktop printers, 200
to 260dpi is enough. A friend who works for the local
newspaper told me most desktop printers use about 250dpi.

Carsten

--
"Miranayam cepauarà naranoaris."
(Calvin nay Hobbes)

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