Re: Conlang software ideas

On Sat, 6 May 2000, Peter Clark wrote:

> Jeffrey Henning wrote:
> > This message stood out from the 3,978 unread messages in my LangReading
> > folder.  Ironically, I've been too busy programming to keep up with the
> > list.  Peter, thanks for the kind words about LangMaker/Win.  It is open
> > source, but is written in Visual Basic 3 and is dependent on an esoteric
> > component (the Formula One spreadsheet engine).  At some point, I would
> > love to create a JavaScript version -- JavaScript, since it is the most
> > used language and could run within web pages.  Unfortunately,
> > LangMaker/Win represents about 80 hours of work, and with four kids,
> > three unfinished novels, a couple of web sites and my own software
> > company, I don't have the time to re-implement it, as much as I would
> > like to.
>         I was not aware that LangMaker was OpenSource. Last time I checked
> (granted, this was a long time ago!) it was crippled to 100 words--is this
> still true? Guess I should check my bookmarks more often, huh? :)
I think that it wouldn't take much more than 20 hours to reimplement
Langmaker in something portable, like Python and tkInter - especially
if the spreadsheet presentation is replaced by an html table
representation. After all, all the hard thinking has already been
done ;-).

>         JavaScript is nice in that it uses a near-universal medium: the
> web browser. Unfortunately, it can't write to disk, which means that all
> those nice words would have to be cut/pasted.
>         I understand the lack of time. Makes me wish I was back in
> college, where I always had the time to do other things than homework and
> assignments. :P Then I would have taken that C course that I always
> thought about taking.
>
Yes, there has been a time when there was plenty of leisure for fun
projects. However, most of them were canceled in favour of Project Pub,
at the time - I'm rather more productive nowadays.

> Herman Miller wrote:
> > I've occasionally had the idea to write a conlang-friendly Unicode text
> > editor (with support for Tengwar, Engsvanyali, and other conscripts that
> > require special handling), but I can never find the spare time.
I'm quite close to producing a usable Unicode editor, myself. What I
need to do is integrate the editor I already have with a
point-and-click character entry interface, and the basics are ready.
The problem with Unicode and conlangs is that while there are a lot
of conlang fonts, none of them have a Unicode encoding. There's a
fairly usable Java Unicode editor that can run inside a browser,
and Yudit is usable, too.

>         That's what I forgot to mention! But not only Unicode, and not
> only able to handle scripts like Tengwar (Enamyn also uses vowel
> pointing), but also capable of printing text in any direction, and can
> display texts in different directions on the same page. Enamyn has two
> scripts, a horizontal script for everyday use, and a vertical script
> reserved for scriptual or ornamental usage. In a book like the Bible, the
> main text would be in the horizontal script, with selected or important
> passages repeated in the vertical script. Something like this, where
> ">" is horizontal and "V" is vertical:
>         ____________ ____________
>         |           |           |
>         | VV >>>>>> | >>>>>> VV |
>         | VV >>>>>> | >>>>>> VV |
>         | VV >>>>>> | >>>>>> VV |
>         | VV >>>>>> | >>>>>> VV |
>         | VV >>>>>> | >>>>>> VV |
>         | VV >>>>>> | >>>>>> VV |
>         |           |           |
>         ------------ ------------
>
Now that's a serious challenge ;-).

>         Need to find out if my WordPerfect 8 can do this. Anyone have
> StarOffice and can tell me if it has such a feature?
No, not at all. You need to find special purpose exotic-language
editors for features like that, and most of those are completely
incompatible with anything else. Like mt-script, which had a lot
of promise, but couldn't export to Unicode, couldn't print and
didn't support input methods.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.valdyas.org