Re: Offlang suggestion & counterproposal

En réponse à Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:

>
> Who wishes to say something on this subject?
>
Well, I had written in more than half an hour a mail to reply to yours, but I
lost it since this $#@%&#$#!! of webmail took the very &%!@$#@$%$ moment I
chose to send it to &@#$%*!@#$!!&#$@ crash!!! !@@$#@$$&##@*#@$#!@$&!!!

Since I don't have the time to rewrite it completely, I will just make a
summary of what I wrote in it, still hoping that this mail will reappear one
day out of the ether (no chance, it's neither in my sent-mail nor in my draft
box... It has just been completely lost :((( ).

Basically, I said that I agreed the basic arguments against an official club,
except that I found Jan being more frightened by the word itself than by the
thing, since what he proposed was basically the activities of a club, but
without giving it such a name (just like some people are afraid to use the
word "hobby" because it would allegedly have some negative
connotations... :)) ).

But my main reaction was on the idea of a conlang monthly. I found the idea
basically good, but thought it would be nicer as a conlang journal, where
people would send articles to be published (without the pretention of
an "International Journal of Language Construction, with a board of readers who
decide whether an article can be published or not, but rather a tongue-in-cheek
journal with an editorial and calls for conlang meetings and reports, etc...
besides normal conlang related articles, like conlang sketches - it would be a
nice thing for people who can't have access to a webpage but find mail too
restrictive to publish their language sketches. It could contain images for
instance -, and maybe reports on the activity of the list. It could be also a
nice place to put the Conlang poll results and the Conlang FAQ). I also thought
that a monthly was too frequent to allow people to send enough articles
(conlangers are busy people) and I saw more a trimestrial publication (with a
special one for Conlang Day :)) ) with a limit for sending articles of one
month before publication (to allow enough time to actually make this journal
and correct all problems that would occur). Articles sent after this limit
would have to wait for the next release (so there would always be in fact three
months for collecting articles).

As for the format of this journal itself, I thought HTML was too restritive for
our purpose, but PDF would fit the requirements of electronic sending, platform
independence, and the need for a good looking thing when printed :)) (and since
it wouldn't be meant for web publishing - despite Maarten's opinion about
PDF :)) -, it wouldn't be a problem). The only problem would be the format of
the articles when sent. I consider Word to be a bad solution, since the
different versions of Word are not even compatible (despite Microsoft's claims)
and it's extremely difficult to manipulate big files with Word, and to put
different files together without making a mess. My best shot would be to do
like "serious" journals: using LaTeX. Despite its frightening looks, LaTeX is
nearly as easy as HTML (and I can make it easier by creating a special "conlang-
article" package that I would send to people who want to write an article) as
long as you don't want to make a fancy presentation (and we don't want to do
that in this case :)) ), cross-platform compatible, extremely stable when
handling long files, allows extremely easily inclusion of new parts in a file,
and easily converted to PDF (I can do it myself). Moreover, LaTeX is free, and
there is a LaTeX release somewhere to download for free for every platform
existing :) . Of course, there would be the problem of exotic scripts. But that
could be handled with pictures (there are normally good tools to convert
pictures from many formats into Encapsulated Postcript).

Of course, this is just a proposal, but I volunteer for receiving the articles
and make them into one journal. If I receive enough positive reactions, I think
we could make the first issue for Conlang Day (which is? I never remember it...
10th July?).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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