Re: [lojban] Tangent the second: ASCII

[Craig Daniel <craigbdaniel@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Alan Post <alanpost@sunflowerriver.org> wrote:
>
> I'm particularly drawn to the aesthetic of á é í ó ú to mark stress,
> rather than capital letters.  I like this because I'm more
> confortable with diacritic marks than I am with the idea of a letter
> having two distinct written forms.  On that particular example alone
> I get interested in non-ASCII characters.

I use stress marked by accents (when I must mark it at all, which is
seldom) in handwriting.

Am I correct in remembering that even in standard Lojban orthography
it is not invalid to mark stress on only the vowel, rather than the
consonants of the syllable as well?

If so, I suggest that the two approaches can be merged harmoniously.
All it takes is the creation of Lojbanic fonts wherein the accented
vowels (and accented versions of the consonants able to be syllabic)
are the "capital" forms. From the perspective of a computer, this
means staying in the ASCII realm; it also means that although the font
isn't the one you're used to using, the characters used within that
font are the standard ones and you're not actually deviating from the
ASCII orthography - just displaying it differently to anyone who
happens to have the right font. For everyone who likes things to look
the way they do with capitalization, they just don't install the font,
and they see your (still correct) Lojban rendered the way they're used
to.

Anyone know how to use their favorite font editor? If so, hack up your
favorite open-sourced font that's suitable for body text, distribute
it, and because writing with that assumption doesn't actually break
the standards (unless I'm wrong about the vowel thing, in which case
you want to make the consonants have identical capital and lowercase
forms for the same effect and then you'll have things break whenever
you want to accent a syllabic consonant) it requires no validation
from the LLG or the BPFK - just people installing a new font for
reading Lojban in, and that only if they feel like it.

 - mi'e .kreig.daniyl.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.