Shawalphabet YahooGroup Archive Browser

2010/3/10 Thomas Thurman <tthurman@...>
>
> When I do the printed edition of Alice, which would be a better layout, from the reader's point of view?

FWIW, my limited sample of bilingual texts (a Greek/German New
Testament and a Greek/German book of folk tales) both have Greek on
the left page, German on the right page.

Plus multiple columns per page might make the columns rather narrow at
typical paperback sizes.

So - I have no idea what would be easier, but I think I'd expect
page-per-script rather than column-per-script.

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

Wow, Thomas
You are much further along with Alice, than I anticipated.
The Sample PDF pages are beautiful.
I really like the basic font. Italics are always tricky in Shavian.
The only thing I would think of changing, would be to put a little more margin in-between the Shavian text and the Roman since they are on the same page.
Really nice work, congratulations.
Regards, Paul V.
P.S. Please provide detailed instruction on how and when we can order or copies of Alice.
_______________________-attached_____________________________
--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, Thomas Thurman <tthurman@...> wrote:
> Rather than answer all the questions individually, I have started a new
> thread. Feel free to comment on any of these.
>
> 1. I have a full translation of both *Alice's Adventures in Wonderland*and
> *Alice through the Looking Glass*.
> 2. I intend to print and self-publish both of them sometime this year in
> a single volume.
> 3. I don't know whether hardback or paperback would be better.
> 4. However, I am in the middle of a contract to write a technical book
> (in the conventional alphabet!) and don't have a lot of spare time right at
> the moment. So the project has been delayed by a few months.
> 5. Tenniel's illustrations are out of copyright, and I intend to use
> them.
> 6. I have written a preface explaining the Alphabet, which I intend to
> add. It's a printed form of my "Gentle Introduction to Shavian", from
> http://shavian.org.uk/learn/ .
> 7. The Shavian version of *Not Ordinarily Borrowable* already has this
> preface.
> 8. Ordinary publishers do like .doc, it's true, but if you self-publish
> you have to provide .pdf because it doesn't need to be edited before it's
> sent to the press.
> 9. I was originally planning to do the *Alice* work in OpenOffice, but I
> don't think it can handle what's needed for some of the fancier illustration
> work.
> 10. I am now planning to do the work in TeX. This will require a little
> rewriting of the scripts which I used to produce the OpenOffice version.
> 11. Here is a chapter from the version I was setting up in OpenOffice:
> http://shavian.org.uk/pdf/alice/ch01.pdf
> 12. You see that I decided to do an interlinear version with two columns,
> one for each alphabet, rather than on facing pages as in *Androcles*. It
> works, but I'm not certain this was the best idea.
>
> peace,
>
> Thomas
>

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 22:33, pvandenbrink11 <vandenbrinkg@...> wrote:
> P.S. www.shavian.org seems to non-responsive. Anyone know what the problem is?

I got an email from the admin of the server telling me that the
machine is down with a suspected hardware problem and he shall be
migrating the machine to a new server (Max OS X Server instead of
FreeBSD).

However, I told him he needn't bother to migrate the shavian.org
website; I took this as the impetus to hand over the domain to someone
else, who'll presumably be hosting it on a different machine anyway.

Is there something specific you used shavian.org for?

After all, it mostly consisted of the front page (a list of links); a
forum that was pretty much unmoderated and, so I'm told, a spam
magnet; and my "languages of Almea" sub-site which had nothing at all
to do with the Shaw alphabet.

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

As I mentioned earlier, I've been working on typesetting an interlinear *
Alice* in Shavian. My first attempt, using OpenOffice, had two columns on
each page. However, I agree with whoever said (I think it was Philip) that
this looks cluttered. So I've done it on facing pages, as *Androcles* did.

Here's chapter three of *Alice in Wonderland*:
http://shavian.org.uk/pdf/alice/wonderland-03.pdf

Feedback is welcome. I'll be trying to get a chapter done every day. Would
you like me to upload them as I finish them so you can see them?

(Technical details: I realised that this would be an uphill battle to
typeset using any existing solution, even TeX. So this was done using a
custom typesetter in Perl. I may tidy up and release the typesetter so that
people can typeset other works in the same way. Most books will pose much
less of a challenge than *Alice*, because *Alice* needs a lot of custom
work, such as the "Fury said to a mouse..." poem. Is there a book you'd
like to see typeset this way?)

peace,

Thomas

Hi everyone. Just joined... and just got sent cshaws2.ttf, which th emoderator says is the "standard font for Shavian writing in this group".

Oh my paws and whiskers.

What a nightmare! It's got Shavian glyphs mapped to the Latin alphabet AND it's got Shavian glyphs mapped to the old CSUR registry.

I sure as heck think that the Unicode mappings http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U10450.pdf ought to be the standard used by anyone who's working with Shavian.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

+1

On 14 March 2010 08:29, Arc Riley <arcriley@...> wrote:

> +1
>
> +1 from me as well (I think I've ranted at length on this subject on this
list before).

I believe Yahoo doesn't, or didn't, handle actual Shavian characters very
well, which hampers discussion in the Alphabet itself on this list, other
than via this Latin-mapping hack.

Things may have changed; let's see. 𐑔𐑦𐑙𐑟 𐑥𐑱 𐑣𐑨𐑝 𐑗𐑱𐑯𐑡𐑛;
𐑤𐑧𐑑𐑕 𐑕𐑰. Did that come through mangled? If it still does, it's a
shame that this, which is probably the most live place to discuss the
Alphabet online, still can't actually cope with Shavian characters!

Thomas

2010/3/14 Thomas Thurman <tthurman@gnome.org>
>
> Things may have changed; let's see.  𐑔𐑦𐑙𐑟 𐑥𐑱 𐑣𐑨𐑝 𐑗𐑱𐑯𐑡𐑛; 𐑤𐑧𐑑𐑕 𐑕𐑰.  Did that come through mangled?

Looks fine to me.

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@gmail.com>

Hi Thomas,

Facing pages is much better from an ergonomics point of view. One just
reads the whole page without interruptions. Soon the reader won't even
realise they're skipping whole pages of TO.

Once one starts to get immersed in the flow of a story, it's amazing how
few characters one actually reads. Indeed, even many common "noise" or
"filler" words (syntactic necessities) are forecast from context and
confirmed by glance. I haven't tested it scientifically, but my hunch
is that people would learn Shavian much better from the more immersive
environment of full pages of Shavian, with the "crib sheet" a little
more effort further away.

So please don't use columns, unless your intended text width
substantially exceeds 15 cm (6 inches).

Regards,
Yahya

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, Philip Newton wrote:
>
> 2010/3/10 Thomas Thurman wrote:
> >
> > When I do the printed edition of Alice, which would be a better
layout, from the reader's point of view?
>
> FWIW, my limited sample of bilingual texts (a Greek/German New
> Testament and a Greek/German book of folk tales) both have Greek on
> the left page, German on the right page.
>
> Plus multiple columns per page might make the columns rather narrow at
> typical paperback sizes.
>
> So - I have no idea what would be easier, but I think I'd expect
> page-per-script rather than column-per-script.
>
> Cheers,
> Philip

Thomas,

Chapter 3, as presented, is pretty impressive!

As you will no doubt gather from my posting style (if you read the group
online or see the html-version emails), I vastly prefer text that is
larger and causes no eyestrain whatsoever. My Grade One reading primer
was just about perfect! ;-)

So it won't surprise you if I ask how it would look if you doubled the
text height and increased the aspect ratio enough to make the short
letters squarer than now - wider, anyway - by 10-20%. Perhaps a little
more space between letters would also help. For example, I presently
find the character for the long Ee in "indeed" quite hard to decipher.

A positive side-effect of this is that the Shavian text would occupy
rather more of the page width than it now does. At present, the Shavian
rather gives the effect of being a short-hand - not necessarily a bad
thing to emphasise that it is quite terse, but not at the expense of
readability.

I note that I had little trouble reading the TO at the current text size
- but this almost entirely due to familiarity with both the script and
the particular text. While Shavian remains less familiar, it's probably
worthwhile using larger type for it. The greater the perceived ease of
use, the more that people will want to use it.

BTW, I particularly enjoyed seeing Alice reading Shavian!

On your typesetting question, yes, I also have some "sight poems", that
depend for meaning on both the words and their presentation, and would
like to try setting them in Shavian. More generally, almost any book of
poetry can benefit from a sympathetic setting. How about Walt Whitmn's
"Leaves of Grass"? - one of my favourite poets.

Regards,
Yahya


--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, Thomas Thurman wrote:
>
> As I mentioned earlier, I've been working on typesetting an
interlinear *
> Alice* in Shavian. My first attempt, using OpenOffice, had two
columns on
> each page. However, I agree with whoever said (I think it was Philip)
that
> this looks cluttered. So I've done it on facing pages, as *Androcles*
did.
>
> Here's chapter three of *Alice in Wonderland*:
> http://shavian.org.uk/pdf/alice/wonderland-03.pdf
>
> Feedback is welcome. I'll be trying to get a chapter done every day.
Would
> you like me to upload them as I finish them so you can see them?
>
> (Technical details: I realised that this would be an uphill battle to
> typeset using any existing solution, even TeX. So this was done using
a
> custom typesetter in Perl. I may tidy up and release the typesetter
so that
> people can typeset other works in the same way. Most books will pose
much
> less of a challenge than *Alice*, because *Alice* needs a lot of
custom
> work, such as the "Fury said to a mouse..." poem. Is there a book
you'd
> like to see typeset this way?)
>
> peace,
>
> Thomas
>