Re: Orthography typesetter!

Siyo!
That looks SOooo cool!  I wish I had that program
here!

Clint


--- "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> More updates about my conlang (I seem to be hitting
> an inspirational trend
> here...):
>
> I've just written a raw orthography to LaTeX
> generator.
>
> As you may or may not know, my conlang has 27
> consonants and 9 vowels
> (with length, pitch accent, breathing, and nasality)
> -- way more than can
> be represented by the Roman alphabet (esp. in
> ASCII). Hence, the
> orthography (in ASCII) is less than pleasant: I've
> had to resort to
> capital letters (ugh) and digits, and double-letters
> to represent vowel
> length. Not to mention seriously ugly-looking ticks
> and apostrophes and
> tildes, potentially all stringing off a single vowel
> letter, to represent
> vowel breathing, nasality, etc..
>
> But now, I've finally found a way to have a sane
> orthography that doesn't
> make your eyes cross when you try to read it. (OK,
> it may still make your
> eyes cross if you don't know the language, but hey
> :-P)  As you may or may
> not know, LaTeX/TeX is an extremely powerful
> typesetting tool that can
> handle, amongst many difficult things, the placing
> of complex diacritics
> on characters. I've devised a more compact
> representation of my conlang's
> orthography using multiple diacritics per letter as
> necessary (which,
> incidentally, is how I write it on paper -- those
> ugly double-letters,
> etc., are a compromise for ASCII).
>
> And now, I have created a shiny new toy, the
> orthography-to-LaTeX
> convertor, which takes what I type in the original,
> ugly ASCII
> representation, and outputs the LaTeX equivalent
> that would typeset very
> nicely. And I'm very pleased with the results so
> far.
>
> For those who were part of the Translation Relay
> Ring 2 some time ago, you
> may take a look at a more readable version of my
> entry here:
>
> PostScript (recommended, this is MUCH higher
> quality):
>
>
http://quickfur.myip.org/~hsteoh/conlang/relay.1/anecdote.ps
>
> PDF (only if you're one of those deprived of
> PS-viewing tools :-P):
>
>
http://quickfur.myip.org/~hsteoh/conlang/relay.1/anecdote.pdf
>
> I have two versions of the text here: one is with
> full accents, to help a
> beginner know where the accents are; and one with
> accents only on stressed
> words, which is closer to how the native script
> would be written. (The
> native script omits accent markings on unstressed
> words except in
> ambiguous cases, the assumption being that the
> reader would know where
> they were supposed to go.) As you can see, this is a
> LOT more readable
> than something that goes:
>         ni biz3t30' d3 bii'l3ni. ...
>
> Currently, I have a longer story (it actually fills
> one page on the LaTeX
> output!) which I've also typeset with my new toy,
> with remarkably
> beautiful results. But I'm still working on
> editorial changes to the text
> itself, so you people would have to wait for a bit
> before you see it ;-)
>
>
> T
>
> --
> One who has not yet appreciated the beauty of
> language is not worthy to
> bemoan its flaws.

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