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Re: Introduction, and a Couple Questions

From:Parker Glynn-Adey <parkerglynnadey@...>
Date:Monday, January 28, 2008, 16:56
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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Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>