Re: Typesetting Lojban [was: Lojban word processor for Windows?]

[David Brookshire Conner <nellardo@concentric.net>]

[ I've split this thread into typesetting and text editing ]
mark@kli.org writes:
> >Oddly enough I was thinking about just this problem this morning as I
> >was walking to work. In particular, Loglan's regular structure gives
> >the text editor lots of help in e.g., automatically typesetting (a la
> >LaTeX).
> 
> I was thinking along similar lines wrt typography and typesetting for
> Lojban (I've been designing a Latin-character Klingon font, with
> appropriate ligatures, etc). But you can't improve too much on some nice
> cold monospaced Courier-like fonts for Lojban. It fits the language.

Urgh. Okay, maybe it is just me, but I find monospaced fonts hard to
read. I don't find Lojban to be cold. Rather, I notice its rich
capacity for metaphor, its poetic rhythms, the fluid syntax. It is
certainly *precise*, no doubt about it, but cold? Not to me. But then, 
I'm a hacker, so speaking in Prolog doesn't seem too strange :-)

I did an experiment where I developed a mode for using Tengwar
(Tolkien's Elvish font) with Lojban. Surprisingly, it worked amazingly
well (better than it did for Brown's original Loglan). Lojban's
phonemics are so regular and uniform, and the Tengwar maps so readily
to phonemic structures, the two go hand in hand. The Tehtar for the
vowels (various little accents and such, for those not familiar with
the orthography) have a nice side effect in making syntactic structure
*visible* - any word with a tengwa with no tehta ("r" is the plural in
Quenya and Sindarin) must be a selbri (or possibly a name). 

Most of the basic little words end up being a single glyph: one tengwa
with one tehta above, maybe one below. This suggests ligatures for
these combinations, at least in Tengwar. They become pictogram-like
word-characters, yet still have all the phonemic information apparent.

Actually, the one open question I'd still muddling about for this mode 
is whether to put "r" and "l" in Row 6 of the Tengwar - the
semivowels. This has a certain elegance, but it does make the writing 
a bit more monotonous looking. But most tengwar modes don't put r and
l up there, but as part of the "other tengwa".

> >On another tack, a lojban font would be an interesting
> >problem. Specifically, the ligatures would probably be different from
> >an English font (as letter frequency is different), and would probably 
> >emphasize the cmavo.

> See above. I gave that some thought, but didn't come up with
> anything. Lojban doesn't feel right with much in the way of "real"
> ligatures (like fi, fl, etc). Typography to make the cmavo more
> distinctive might be nice,

Certainly. Most of the ones starting with a c seem straight-forward,
as do ones with f, t, d, g, k. That's just off the top of my head for 
the cmavo.

Some of the consonant clusters look amenable, as well. For instance,
an English font wouldn't have a ligature for "cm", as it never (?)
appears in english. In lojban, of course, it's common. For that
matter, in "lojban" itself, "jb" and "an" look feasible, and occur
often enough that you might do it.

I guess this seems ligature-heavy, but to my thinking, typing the
letters together emphasizes the structure, which is part of the beauty 
of lojban.

> but I'm not sure how. Except maybe to emphasize ".i", but then if you
> break lines at every jufra (which I personally don't do in writing most of
> the time) you don't need it. 

Yeah, I wouldn't break at every jufra either. So emphasizing .i gets
us right back to ligatures for little words.

> Though you do want to make sure your font does nice things with the
> apostrophe. Not to much and certainly not too little. Again,
> monospace seems oddly workable. The overly wide space for the
> apostrophe makes sure you can't mistake "ta'i" for "tai".

Hmmm. True, but the overly long space also suggests "ta' i" or even
"ta i". Using a ligature for 'i (merging the dot over the i and the
apostrophe to make a bent line) would look sufficiently different that 
I think it would work well. And you still have tons of white space
beneath the apostrophe.


Brook

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