Re: CHAT: WPs for conlangs [was: CHAT: Microsoft]

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Barbara Barrett wrote:

> Barbara Babbles;
>
> Operating systems; It's like VHS vs Betamax, the "best" system had nought to
> do with which won out alas ;-)
>
> However, be that as it may, if you're computing on a budget one is kinda
> stuck with Windoze(TM) ;
Well actually, Linux and FreeBSD are both cheaper (assuming the time it
takes to install/learn it/set it up is worthless), coming in at a minimum
of gratis and the highest I currently know of is US$699 from SCO...

> so my question is which windoze compatable WP is most useful for
> conlangers?
Well, do you mind not using a word processor at all? A lot of us, but
certainly not the majority, use LaTeX, which is sort-of a bit like HTML in
that you type in commands like \emph{emphasised} or
  \begin{longtable}{lrc}
  left & right & centred\\
  \end{longtable}
It lets you type in lots and lots of characters with any diacritic on any
by doing \'\j to get j acute (or indeed \'j to get j with a dot and an
acute), \v{q} to get a q with a carot(?) above, \textipa{TIN} to type
'thing' in the IPA etc. etc. etc. It also has very nice fonts.* The
downside is, of course, all that typing (which I don't mind, but it does
mean being aware that, say " is not how you enter double quotes), and the
fact that its more like HTML3.2 than XHTML inasmuchas some of the design
is not really easily separable from the content (which I find makes it
ugly). It involves an investment of effort.

It can be rendered to its own DVI (device independent) format, as well as
PostScript, Adobe PDF and HTML, and probably others too.

* It has its own font format, built with METAFONT, a programming language
that can do more complicated things than TTF/PS fonts. It can also use PS
and TTF fonts if you make them available to it.


On the other hand, all newer (Unicode-based) text engines are capable of
putting any diacritic on any letter, and with enough fonts you'll easily
have oddball european (and non-european) characters, Cyrillic, Greek, IPA,
... If you're regularly typing in phi though, you'll find it convenient to
use something like Tauvoltesoft (?) Keyboard Manager, which lets you make
custom keymaps (I think?). (Not a recomendation, I've never played with
it, GTK/Gnome on Linux has input methods available everywhere I'm tempted
to use special characters when not using LaTeX.) Recent versions of Word
and probably Word Perfect almost definetly satisfy this criterion. On the
other hand, at least for now most fonts don't have very nice-looking
diacritics unless there's precombined forms. OpenType (a new font format)
should improve that in future, though (not automatically, it needs to be
programmed in, so it might not if font foundaries are evil enough).


--
Tristan

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