Re: Introduction, and a Couple Questions

On 28/01/2008, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> Parker Glynn-Adey writes:
> > Hi there, my name is Parker Glynn-Adey. ...
>
> Welcome to the list! :-)
>
> >...
> >    -Why do most people start their work on a language with their
> phonology?
>
> I started with grammar in my first language, but because I needed
> words, I made them up as I needed them, without rules.  This lead to
> some very peculiar phonotactics, which had to be retrofitted to what I
> had.  Therefore in later projects, I started with the phonology in
> order to get a more consistent set of words.


>...
> >    -I notice that a lot of people have conlangs that take the form of
> pretty
> > PDF files, is anyone here a LaTeX user?
>
> I used LaTeX for Tyl Sjok (second language) and for Fukhian (first
> language).  To make the font, I used Metafont for the Fukhian font,
> which resulted in very nice fonts, I think.  However, I encountered
> problems because my fonts had complex typeset rules (ligatures,
> overlapping, etc.), which was very hard to do in LaTeX.  For Tyl Sjok,
> which uses a logographic script, Metafont could not handle the complex
> stacking rules, so I used an own program to produce PostScript files.

Wow, Tyl Sjok looks incredibly interesting, and it would seem you've already
developed some of the ideas I had planned to use in my language. I'm going
to need to read over your various writings about it. Taking as example Tyl
Sjok, and Rikchik, I think that to do the two dimensional stuff I'm
interested in, I'll probably have to use PostScript. This is entirely
do-able though.

Thanks for the information!

Another problem was publishing: HTML is the convenient format for Web
> publishing.  latex2html was a pain in the bottom because it changed so
> much.  Therefore, I abandoned LaTeX for subsequent projects in favour
> of HTML.  It wasn't a problem, because the following few conlangs had
> no own fonts and were happy with Unicode.
>
> Still, I am using Metapost for a new font that is not yet completed
> (it is inspired by on Ethiopic (Ge'ez)).  Metapost lets you use
> Metafont syntax (which I generate with Perl) with its high level
> operations and equation solving and produces very simple PostScript
> files.  I am hoping to be able to read those files and to create .ttf
> files from the result, which would be compatible with a lot of
> applications.
>
> **Henrik
>

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