tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jul 01 11:53:15 1993

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>From: Will Martin <[email protected]>
>Date:    Thu, 1 Jul 93 08:59:38 EDT
>X-Mailer: UVa PCMail 1.7.1
>Content-Length: 1369

>Sorry, guy, you miss my point. Since there is no upper case "a" in
>Klingon, why not map both the "A" and "a" keystrokes to the character "a"?
>Similarly, since there is no lower case "D" in Klingon, why not map both "d"
>and "D" keystrokes to "D"? Then those who type using Marc Okrand's keystrokes
>OR those who type without using the shift key will get the same result
>appearing on the screen and page. That way, you can type faster with fewer
>typos. 

Oh, I'm sorry.  I did misunderstand.

>Besides, if you are mapping to an alternate character set, just exactly
>what are you going to DO with "A" and "d" keystrokes? Leave them BLANK? And
>what about "f"? Also, my experience is that it takes very little retraining
>to learn to type a "k" when you want "q" and a "q" when you want "Q", an "f"
>for "ng", a "g" for "gh" and an "x" for "tlh".

Actually, yes, I was leaving them blank.  This is no shame, from what I've
seen of METAFONT fonts; and it leaves room for future expansion, as some of
the "other glyphs" mentioned in HolQeD 1:1 come to light.  You could, if
you wanted, redefine 'd' and 'h' and 'i' and such to \active characters and
have them expand to their uppercase equivalents in your own personal TeX
macro package, but I don't think it's the font-designer's place to do such
a thing.  (that could make formatting commands more difficult, but I think
a diligent TeX hacker could work out the fine points).  Redundant
characters in a font, from what I've seen, simply aren't done.  If you want
to typeset them under various circumstances, you instruct the *typesetting*
program (not the font-designing program) to do so.

Little retraining for you may be a lot to someone else.  I once retrained
myself to hit '+' instead of the space-bar, when my space-bar was broken,
but I wouldn't recommend everyone try it.  Besides, what if you're not
doing the typing?  Let's say you saw a wonderful piece of Klingon prose or
poetry on this list, and wanted to print it out in pIqaD?  I'd like to see
you able simply to zap the text into a TeX document, add a \font command
and maybe a little formatting, and zoom!  OK, so I'm not sharp enough to do
all the work in the ligature tables, but I'll keep the search/replace
operations as low as I possibly can.

And once you learn to type 'x' for 'tlh' (or, ugh, 'f' for 'ng') or
whatever, you must then learn to read it, as you're reading over your
seventy-page tlhIngan dissertation online, and that's uncomfortably close
to enforcing an orthography reform to me.

>But this is just a suggestion. If you have better ideas as to what to do
>with "A" and "d", let's hear them. {{:)

Not yet, but who knows?

>--   charghwI'

~mark



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