Shawalphabet YahooGroup Archive Browser

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
wrote:
>
> 2010/3/14 Thomas Thurman tthurman@...
> >
> > Things may have changed; let's see. ð`"ð`¦ð`™ð`Ÿ
ð`¥ð`± ð`£ð`¨ð`
ð`—ð`±ð`¯ð`¡ð`›; ð`¤ð`§ð``ð`•
ð`•ð`°. Did that come through mangled?
>
> Looks fine to me.
>
> Cheers,
> Philip
> --
> Philip Newton philip.newton@...

Looks fine to me, too!

But I agree with the OP that we could use some real standards ...

Regards,
Yahya

As the developer of cshaws2.ttf, I apologize for the poor quality
and inappropriate code points of the glyphs.

In my defense, allow me to say that the font was developed
fifteen years ago when those mappings were rather common.

I also have no tools for placing glyphs at code points outside
of plane zero. I invite others to do so.

--Phillip Driscoll



----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Everson
To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2010 5:12 AM
Subject: [shawalphabet] The standard font is not standard!



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/

If you don't mind, I'll be happy to re-map the font.

What does the name "cshaws2" mean?

On 15 Mar 2010, at 11:40, Ph.D. wrote:

>
> As the developer of cshaws2.ttf, I apologize for the poor quality
> and inappropriate code points of the glyphs.
>
> In my defense, allow me to say that the font was developed
> fifteen years ago when those mappings were rather common.
>
> I also have no tools for placing glyphs at code points outside
> of plane zero. I invite others to do so.
>
> --Phillip Driscoll

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

On 15 March 2010 00:48, yahya_melb <yahya@...> wrote:

> Chapter 3, as presented, is pretty impressive!
>

Thank you!

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
> emphasi se that it is quite terse, but not at the expense of readability.
>

The width of the Shavian lines is a fixed proportion of the width of the
Latin lines. I tried running the program again with the text size set to
24pt instead of 12pt, and the Shavian/Latin ratio set to 0.8 instead of
0.6. This is the result:
http://shavian.org.uk/pdf/alice/wonderland-03-large.pdf - is that what you
were thinking?


> 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.
>

We could certainly do *Leaves of Grass*, since it's out of copyright.
Someone also suggested re-doing *Androcles*, and I think we could probably
throw in some more GBS works with it. Anyway, if people would like to work
on seeing how things would look as editions with parallel texts on facing
pages, I'll tidy up the Perl script that did the typesetting here and
release it. (Its name is *fury*, after the dog in *Alice*.) I think I'll
also make another script to import texts from Project Gutenberg.

I think the trouble with doing *Alice* with parallel texts on facing pages,
apart from the difficulties caused by the way it plays with typography, is
that it makes great use of illustrations, and either these have to appear on
both pages or there has to be a large empty space on one side. We don't
have that problem so much with plays and poetry.

Thomas

Phillip,

It's probably best to change the name of the font so that the font headers are compliant with today's norms. But I've had an even better idea.

I am amalgamating together Shaw Sans No. 2 and Shaw Sans No. 3 into:

Shaw Sans Standard

where No. 3 is the bold face for No. 2. I am also adding an Oblique and a Bold Oblique. I used Free Sans for the Latin glyphs, which support basic MacRoman and Windows 1252.

I would like these to be tested, to make sure they all work.

Please see http://www.evertype.com/fonts/shavian/ShawSansStandard.zip

The licence for the fonts says "Free for personal and commercial use. May not be sold." -- there was no other notice in the older fonts.

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

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On 15 Mar 2010, at 15:53, phil@... wrote:

> I am honored that you are working with these fonts. I think Oblique versions are a great idea.

Please test them. In fairness the obliques were generated automatically, just setting a -12° slope. That's probably fine, but I wonder whether whether that works for YEA and WOE and YEW.

In any case, this font should do the style thing quite nicely.

I have not looked at your other fonts, or indeed the other fonts in this list's archive.

But I do think that a cleanup should be done. Old encodings should not be supported -- indeed such texts should be converted and replaced by the converted texts. Or if preserved, put into a Deprecated Old Stuff folder.

> I stated in an email a couple of years ago that I have placed my Shaw fonts into the public domain. Do with them as you feel is best.

OK, I'll make sure the licence reflects that.

But please, several of you, test them first.

By they way, I can't seem to get a Shavian keyboard to work under Snow Leopard.

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

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "yahya_melb" <yahya@...> wrote:
> --- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, Thomas Thurman wrote:
> I have a self-published children's book called "Not Ordinarily
> Borrowable".
>
> I'm vaguely considering a Shavian edition, either as a printed book or
> as a free e-book. It's about 15,000 words; I'll be checking it myself,
> but does anyone want to volunteer to proofread the transliteration?
>
> I've missed any replies to your request. I'd be happy to volunteer to
> proofread the transliteration. Just make sure you give me enough hints
> as to your preferred pronunciations! ;-)

I've put the Shavian edition up at
http://shavian.org.uk/pdf/other/shawadvice.pdf
(it was made with OpenOffice.)

I added a version of my "Gentle Introduction to Shavian" at the start; I think something like this is helpful at the start of Shavian editions.

Let me know what you think, whether you find any problems, and whether you enjoy the story. :)

Thomas

Hi Philip

Nice to hear from you.
I'd like to keep the shavian.org web-site going.

It served 3 very useful purposes.
First, It hooked a lot of useful links together, so that anyone doing a search on the Shavian Alphabet, would get to a lot of useful sites,
not just our own.
Secondly, it preserved and explained the 2 different Yahoo forums,
and provided easy read access to our new forum, even to those unversed in Yahoo groups.
There is a lot of useful information in the old forum, that would become lost if people did not know that it was there.

Third, more personally, it introduced new people to other alternate Alphabets to English, besides the Shavian Alphabet. Fellow travellers who may end up spreading the concept of a simple phonetic alphabet. As we really are not certain what new Alphabet will eventually surplant the Roman Alphabet, we should not make our viewpoint too exclusive. For example the Pitman Alphabet, I.T.A. the Read Alphabet and the Revised Shaw Abjad, all provide new and better ways to look at English Spelling, than the Roman Alphabet. And the link to Omniglot.com is widely useful.

Having Shavian.org was an easy access portal to the Shavian Alphabet, as well as a useful way to group together some differing views on a practical Phonetic alphabet for English.

I suppose I could set up something similar with a different domain name, but is it possible to retain the Domain name for that purpose?
It will take me a little time to arrange it, all.
Regards, Paul V.
________________________attached_______________________________

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:
>
> 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@...>
>

On 15 March 2010 18:44, pvandenbrink11 <vandenbrinkg@...> wrote:

> I'd like to keep the shavian.org web-site going.
>
> Philip has set up the ownership of shavian.org to pass to me, which should
happen in a few days. When that happens, I think I will move the content on
shavian.org.uk to shavian.org and make shavian.org.uk into a redirect.

I will add a page of links so that this useful function of shavian.org is
retained. Do people have any other suggestions?

Thomas