Re: CHAT: Handwriting (was: Re: CHAT: Coming out of the conlang closet)

On Mon, Jun 03, 2002 at 10:25:25PM +0200, a. koch wrote:
> What about Handwriting for your conlangs? If you've worked on
> scripts, how influenced are those by your own handwriting? Or have
> they been created using a computer?
My conlang's script is still a bit up in the air; its rather complex and
not worth programming on a computer yet until I settle some of the final
details. So to answer your question: my conlang's script is mainly from my
own handwriting. (I seem to have the syndrome of only writing in block
letters -- I've tried to learn cursive a few times in my youth but never
really picked it up. Today I write in sorta half-cursive, mostly-block,
with a ton of bizarre shorthands that people say look like accents.)

This goes also for my conlang's Roman orthography -- because of the large
number of glyphs required to represent my conlang's letters, I needed a
lot of diacritics and unusual letterforms. So I didn't manage to actually
write the orthography on a computer until recently, when I wrote an
orthography-to-LaTeX program, which took the ASCII version of the
orthography (a very ugly system involving digits, capital letters, and
duplicated vowels, to make up for the poverty of the Roman alphabet), and
translated it into even more obscure LaTeX code, but which LaTeX turns
into a beautifully crafted orthography. You can admire the results here:
        http://quickfur.myip.org/~hsteoh/conlang/grammar.ps

(I don't have a PDF version of it, sorry -- my PS-to-PDF convertor sucks.
Maybe Christophe G. can do me a favor and do the conversion for me... but
it may not be worthwhile since this document is still under construction
and is changing very rapidly.)

> I have not created scripts using my own handwriting, only computer
> image programs. Mainly this is because I'm disgraphic...and I just
> like computers.
> Uhh so do you make scripts by hand or by computer? (if you do make
> them)
[snip]

I'd say I prefer to start with handwriting first, just so I can doodle
around with different letterforms until I get something that looks good.
Then I'm OK with spending the time to implement this on computer... I
don't like spending countless hours drawing glyphs on the computer only to
throw them away later because they aren't good enough.


T

--
WindowError:01F Reserved for future mistakes -- YHL

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