tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jan 27 21:26:22 1998

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Re: HIvqa' Paramount Hol (or ST: Encyclopedia)



>Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 17:41:51 -0800 (PST)
>From: "Klingon Ambassador" <[email protected]>
>
>Stardate 98072.3
>
>Greetings.
>
>I was looking through the multimedia and information of the new CD-ROM 
>release, "The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future," 
>by Michael and Denise Okuda, produced and developed by Simon & Schuster 
>Interactive and Imergy, when I noticed a disturbing example of Paramount 
>Hol in action.
>
>In the Encyclopedia Mode, it has the following text entry under the 
>letter 'C'.  I have retained the case-sensitivity and formating of the 
>entry (minus bold and italic) for the sake of accurate reporting.
>
>==BEGIN CITATION==
>
>CHEGH-chew jaj-VAM jaj-KAK
>Klingon expression meaning "It is a good day to die." ("The Way of the 
>Warrior" [DS9])
>
>==END CITATION==

Interesting.  My guess is that this is some variant of "*Heghchu' jajvam
jaj QaQ" or "*Heghchugh jajvam jaj QaQ".  Someone attempting to mirror the
English "today" and "good day" with jajvam and jaj QaQ, and Hegh in there
somewhere.  Sounds like a weak attempt at reading the dictionary.

>P.S.
>In the above example, when I cited the entry from the Encyclopedia I 
>dropped the bold and italic attributes in the interest of optimizing the 
>message unformatted-text programs.  I understand that not all email 
>programs are capable of including HTML formatting, so I don't use that 
>on the list; but what about text formatting like underline, bold and 
>italic?  I'm not talking about colors or font colors, just the basics.  
>Should I avoid using bold and italics when mailing to this list?  I use 
>both Microsoft Exchange and the Hotmail web-based email service to read 
>the my email, and both are capable of displaying standard text 
>formatting.  What about the rest of you?

No.  I read my email in *PLAIN TEXT*, that is bare ASCII letters, no frills
attached.  Look at the archive at www.kli.org to see what I mean (except
that mine is not proportionally spaced).  If you use <i>italics</i>, that's
exactly what I'll see: the word italics with with the letter "i" between
angle-brackets before it and "/i" in angle-brackets.  I can understand that
intellectually, but it's distracting.  It would be worse than that, though,
since as soon as you use italics, your mailer figures "Cool, we're writing
rich text/html/whatever; I'd better mark everything up!  So let's see,
that's a tag for the font, the size, then a little <br> at the end of every
line..."  You can see how this can be difficult to read.

In short: not everyone is on Microsoft (thank Kahless).

~mark


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