Re: [lojban] Tangent the second: ASCII

[Craig Daniel <craigbdaniel@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 10:24 AM, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> That said, while I am not *against* using diacritic marking instead of
> capitals, that is pretty much the extent of my non-ASCII in Lojban
> acceptance.
>

I like it for handwriting, but where computers are involved I think
there are good reasons to stick to ASCII. Not because that restrictive
a set is required, but because keeping it there absent any compelling
reason not to (and Lojban, unlike some languages, has no need to do
otherwise) is good. But I also think capital letters in the middle of
words look ugly, and I think they draw your eye to them more than
accent marks do and can turn into feeling like that word is being
emphasized when it's not instead of like that word has odd stress
specified, so I'm also in favor of indicating stress by means of
diacritics. I don't like the idea of changing the language spec over
it, or of giving up on ASCII-only and making people have to edit all
software that cares, but in a vacuum I prefer it and if the language
were being created in this era of Unicode I'd be a strong proponent of
that as the standard instead of capitalization.

The reason I suggested an alternate font is that it lets you have your
cake and eat it too. The letters are all ASCII, no matter how you're
stressing the words, so for computers it represents no change in the
standards and it captures all the benefits of the restricted character
set. The computer doesn't care how the font you're using renders the
characters, just what character codes they map to; you could make
every glyph look like a dot in slightly different positions and while
it would be totally unreadable to humans it would be the same thing
from a machine's perspective. Ergo, using the diacritics-as-capitals
font means that from a machine-processing perspective all your Lojban
is the same as it's always been, and it's all ASCII-only. But for
humans, it shows up as the alternate convention, which I personally
consider vastly better from an aesthetic perspective and which I
suspect is also more readable. It's the best of both worlds.

It also means that how it appears depends on the reader's preferences
rather than the writer's, since it means the two are just different
renderings of the same underlying standard. If the writer specs the
text as being Lojban or says that's the font it's in and capitalizes
only the vowel in the stress-specified syllable, then if the reader is
looking at it with a stylesheet that says Lojban is in that font and
has that font, it shows up with an accent on the vowel. If the reader
doesn't have the font installed, it gets rendered as whatever font
their software defaults to, and they see no change. So for those who
favor kaptalo over diacritics, it's trivial to keep it that way - just
don't install the font. Lojban will look like it always has. If you do
like diacritics, you have to install a new font to see them since
they're being sent to your machine as ASCII characters for uppercase
letters rather than lowercase letters with accents on them, but it's
not like it's hard to add new fonts.

I propose agreeing on a font modified from something verifiably open
(or built from scratch, but why bother?) rather than something that
might actually just be Verdana in a funny hat (mostly because I'd like
to see the Lojbanized version be open-source, and nobody has the right
to license it thus if it is derived from Verdana and we didn't realize
it); the first easy-to-read font of known provenance to come along
would make a good choice of standard. I'm happy to take a crack at
putting one together, but my life is fairly busy at present (between
part-time school and part-time work that add up to more than a
full-time commitment, plus Lojban not getting top billing among my
hobby projects right now) and I'd have to learn the basics of using a
font editor. The latter is something I kinda want to try anyhow, so at
some point I'll get to work on that, but it'll be a while and if
somebody else who actually knows what they're doing beats me to it, so
much the better.

Once we've got one distributed, I'd like Lojban web stuff to serve
Lojban text in that font wherever possible. (Maybe make the wiki have
a "Lojban text" tag of some sort that defaults to that?) Then adopt an
unofficial community standard that only the nucleus of a
stress-specified syllable should be capitalized; the other way is
still valid, of course (I don't see this as an issue it's worth
changing any part of the baselined language over!), but the
one-capital-per-syllable approach would be preferred. I personally
like that better anyhow, since syllabification varies a little from
person to person when consonant clusters are involved and the correct
way to specify it if you care is with slaka.bu rather than changes in
capitalization. That's an insignificant thing now, but if a lot of
people are looking at it in a diacritic font it's mildly important
since it makes the text not look like ass. The end result of this is
that folks who like seeing diacritics get Lojban that looks prettier
to them, with no change to the orthographic specifications of the
language.

 - mi'e .kreig.daniyl.
who also really will get around to scanning exemplars of his Lojban
calligraphic hand and sharing his other musings on Lojbanic writing
sooner or later

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