Re: My conscript

H.S.Teoh wrote:
>Heh. Those shapes were painfully hand-crafted using a *pixel* editor --
>drawn pixel-by-pixel!! They'd *better* come out good, for the amount of
>effort I put into them. :-) I know there are easier ways to do it, but,
>being the perfectionist that I am, I want to make sure every last detail
>is done right. :-P>
Hmm, from the looks of them, I assumed you'd already created a font.......

>What I *really* should do is to make a font using MetaFont and then
>typeset the script using LaTeX (professional word processing / typesetting
>system for Unix/Linux), but that would mean learning Metafont (which is an
>entire programming language in itself) and learning how to tweak TeX/LaTeX
>to use it. So I think I'll stick with the current approach of designing 36
>or so glyphs for the different sounds and then using cut-and-paste and
>copy-and-modify with my pixel editor.
>
>Eventually, I probably have to do it with Metafont because right now, the
>font size is fixed... and I am NOT gonna spend another 20 hours or so
>re-drawing larger versions of those letters, only to find that I need to
>do it yet a third time for another size... Better save my next effort
>making something in Metafont that is infinitely scalable. :-)>
Seems that you, unlike me, really know your way around on the computer.
Have you ever looked at the Font Creator Program from High Logic.com? (Free
for 30 days, $20-30 or so to register.)  I recently succeeded in creating my
alphabetic Kash font-- lots of trial and error, learn by doing, a couple
crashes,  etc.-- the tutorial was not crystal clear to _my_ mind.  You might
find it quite simple!   I still don't know if I did everything correctly,
but by Jove, the font is installed and works!!  Minor problems remain--
slightly inconsistent character heights and spacings, but it can be edited
(for the upteenth time) if necessary.  As a True Type font, it can do all
point sizes (though less than 24pt is well nigh unreadable-- I didn't make
the characters big enough to start with, but even so, 12pt would cause real
eye-strain, suitable only for legal documents or credit card offers!), plus
bold and italic (really neat).  What a pleasure to be able to type out real,
live texts in Kash; it looks a little cruddy on the screen but prints out
beautifully.

I'm sure it would be a simple matter to take your carefully drawn symbols
and enlarge/reduce/whatever them.  I started with handwritten chars from the
scanner, which required lots of editing, tedious but fun after a while in a
perverse way.  Your super-, in- and sub-scripts might be a problem, but not
insurmountable.
Bear in mind, you have 255 spaces available.

Quite by accident, my /tS/ char, assigned to _c_, will also show up with a
cedilla-- not used in the script, but it looks so good I'm going to figure
out some use for it!

I don't know whether Yoon Ha could create a font for her script; presumably
the computer can be made to write vertically (under Gates, all things are
possible....aren't they?)-- but all those left and right additions would
require a lot of careful tinkering, I think.

Yoon Ha wrote:
>> Looks nice.  Only other comment I have is that semi-dyslexic (well, not
>> "for real," but I might as well be) may confuse letters with their
>> up-down mirror images.  This is sometimes problematic in Korean as well,
>> since nearly *all* the vowels are rotations of 90k degrees from one set,
>> and it can be confusing, especially if you're not awake.>
That's already becoming a problem for me:  /h/ and /f/, and /k/ and /p/, are
very similar-- and /i/ and /u/, and /e/ and /o/ are mirror images. And
although "b" and "d" are /mb, nd/, I tend to type in the m and n chars
too.....Oh well, practice, practice.

I have to confess to being less than a perfectionist..... During the last 10
years of house-remodeling on the cheap, my guiding principle became, "Hey,
it's better than it was......"