Re: Interlinears

On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:14:13 -0500, Tristan McLeay
<conlang@...> wrote:

> BEWARE! Unicode (UTF-8) characters lurk within!
>
>> Where's all the outrage from SEA about this?
>
> SEA?
South East Asia. All them pesky countries that actually *use* furigana /
ruby on a presumably often enough basis for it to be part of the HTML
standard for the last 4 years (which is a long time in HTML years).

>>   I thought ffilig was on the Prime Material Plane. Isn't it? I'd swear
>> I've  seen it, right next to ffllig, in the Alphabetic Presentation
>> Forms. I  *think* there's a place for Tengwar on Plane 1, too, as I
>> recall. There's  quite a vocal elf lobby out there, using words like
>> "serious linguistic  and metalinguistic research" and so on.
>
> Hm, well you seem to be right about the ligatures (except it's in the
> BMP ;).
The PMP was a D&D (the game) reference. The Prime Material Plane is the
"normal" plane of existence, where humans and orcs and beholders frolic,
as opposed to the Etherial, Abbysal, or other Planes, which are home to
weird stuff. I think it's a suitable pun for the place where you find all
the "normal" characters.

> My character map knows nothing about Tengwar, but that mightn't mean
> anything.
The Windows (and I think Mac, and possibly Linux) default Character Map
applications know nothing about planes other than the BMP. You need to go
dig out a third party app, and/or look directly at the charts at
http://www.unicode.org/

Windows comes with support for Planes but it actually needs a registry
kludge in order to activate it. I have no idea what the situation is for
other OSes. I got so pissed off by the font substitution in Linux that I
gave up trying to do anything clever with it.

>>   If I get desperate enough, I'll try LyX again. ISTR trying it, and
>> failing  to install it properly or something, and running away full of
>> fear and  loathing. The plan, should it manifest itself, will be to
>> produce WYSIWYG  docs, and read the "raw" document source to try and
>> help me understand  some of the tutorials online.
>
> Maybe LyX is only comprehensible to people who already know LaTeX, or
> who have someone who does at their disposal... :) Wouldn't surprise me,
> but I have started a few people with it!
Well, the option is still available to me. I started learning LaTeX
before, but kinda got frustrated and bored at only being able to do a
small number of things. I suspect I will try again, though, since Word
(and Windows itself) does such a bad job at accenting characters that it
does not have precomposed entries for.



Paul

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