[lojban-beginners] Re: Printed Materials

[Scott <scottr@synthiotics.com>]

> By the way, I've been assuming a Lojban-English dictionary here.

> No reason we couldn't do others, of course. I'm thinking of the few
> Lojbanists I know and what their native languages are.

lol.  That was the only version I was thinking of too.  But you're right - 
there's absolutely no reason not to branch out into as many languages as we 
have dictionaries for.

Good call!

> So my first picks would be: Spanish, German, French, Turkish,
> Hungarian, and Japanese. And Australian (just kidding nei,omis. :)).
> Also Esperanto, as a tip of the hat to the best-known conlang.
>
> Chinese and Arabic maybe? As part of the Big Six? Am I missing
> anything else from those six?

Russian?  

Maybe Portugese?  Portugal is small, but South America is pretty big...

> How often should these be regenerated and updated? The version
> information should go on the cover, I believe.

I think the date it was generated would be useful information to have on the 
cover.

> If it's every six months, I don't mind at all. If it were every
> month, it would get tedious.

I would think six months would be a good time span.  Depends on how frequently 
the dictionary gets new material, I guess.  Do we have any idea of its rate 
of growth?

> As for the PDF size, IMO it's not worth Jay changing it yet. Maybe
> I could make a PDF writer someday, based on data extracted from
> jbovlaste. I'm a Ruby expert, and learning Austin Ziegler's
> PDF::Writer is on my to-do list.

I'm more concerned about the margin size than the page size.  According to 
their instructions, the margins need to be a minimum of 0.5" on all four 
sides.  Which they might already be for all I know - my pdf reader won't put 
a ruler onscreen and I haven't printed any of the pages out and measured 
them.  Their instructions aside, I'm not sure how important the margins 
really are on three of the sides, but I imagine it's quite important for the 
inner margin so the binding doesn't impact the text.

After thinking about it a bit, I think 8.5x11 for a page size is alright, and 
that the "Wire-O" binding that implies is actually a good choice.  I tend to 
like "regular" books to have perfect binding, but it's nice to be able to lay 
reference materials flat.

mu'o mi'e la skat.