Slashdot Mirror

These folks have several open fonts that cover some lesser-used code points. They don't have a big font with everything, but the Doulos font has pretty good coverage for Latin and Cyrillic scripts.

These folks have several open fonts that cover some lesser-used code points. They don't have a big font with everything, but the Doulos font has pretty good coverage for Latin and Cyrillic scripts.

And that's exactly what I have done.
I'm using english, lithuanian and russian layouts on a daily basis.
The only way to cope with all of them is to use the same layout everywhere.
English is an US winkeys layout with slight modifications for the € sing on AltGr+E

Lithuanian is the same US winkeys layout with the same € mapped to AltGr+E. The lithuanian letters are in the right place and the numbers are accessible thru AltGr+number. ( In lithuanian layout, the top most number bar is used for extra letters )

Russian is a phonetic variant of US winkeys with slight modification for some extra letters in the russian alphabet (spells out like [ yazherty ] ) and the same € mapped to AltGr+E

In that manner I get a QWERTY layout in every language I type.

PS: In linux it's easy to add extra layouts or roll out your own, just look around in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols ( the location depends on your distro). On Mac there's ukelele http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele

If all languages used the Latin script, things wouldn't be so difficult. (Not needing stacked diacritics would make things still easier.) And for commercially viable languages, like Hindi or Lao, even though their scripts present lots of problems for typesetting, there is enough money in it that someone will come up with something reasonable. It's the minority languages which are spoken in these areas, but which often require modified versions of the majority languages' scripts (because they have additional phonemes), that are the problem. Generally, it's a Bad Idea to use a Latin script if everyone around you is using a Brahmi-based script, or a Perso-Arabic script, or Cyrillic.

If you're interested, you might look at http://scripts.sil.org./

Bible translators have also given us XeTeX, which is now an important part of the TeX ecosystem. And a bunch of useful (and good looking!) fonts: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=FontDownloads

We all know LaTeX allows you to focus on the content and magically comes up with beautiful layouts. I mean the single best page layouts are always in the looks-the-same LaTeX format! And it's so intuitive to use!

Looks-the-same format? Wha...? =)

Also, funnily enough (and relevant to the article), one of the groups who is trying to improve (La)TeX's suitability for modern font technologies and supporting obscure languages is SIL, a group that does, among other things, Bible translations. (The end result is XeTeX, one of the best TeX versions out there right now if you want good PDF output and TrueType/OpenType support out of the box.)

We all know LaTeX allows you to focus on the content and magically comes up with beautiful layouts. I mean the single best page layouts are always in the looks-the-same LaTeX format! And it's so intuitive to use!

Looks-the-same format? Wha...? =)

Also, funnily enough (and relevant to the article), one of the groups who is trying to improve (La)TeX's suitability for modern font technologies and supporting obscure languages is SIL, a group that does, among other things, Bible translations. (The end result is XeTeX, one of the best TeX versions out there right now if you want good PDF output and TrueType/OpenType support out of the box.)

SIL has made a couple of very excellent fonts.

You can find them here. Gentium is exceptionally beautiful on paper. Doulos and Charis are also very nice.

All these work fine in LaTeX (well, XeLaTeX, that is), so you can use them without hassle.

No but yes. What you need to use them now is XeTeX, a TeX engine that lets you use OpenType fonts in your TeX documents.

LaTeX per se uses only Type 1 (actually a few more) fonts, and these aren't ready yet.

Does WOFF support complex positioning, etc, like graphite? If not it won't be a lot of help for minority languages as the OS or browser will have to know their layout rules to display them properly. Remember the devanagari error in the Wikipedia logo.

Personally, for printed documents, I like using my own version of a font called Charis SIL, which is an updated version of Matthew Carter's (Verdana, Georgia, among many others) 1980s Bitstream Charter font (which was made open-source in the early 1990s) with good Unicode support. The font doesn't have really good hinting, so it may not look as nice on the screen as a fully hinted font like Verdana (but that's changing because today's autohinting technology is a lot better than in the 1990s when Verdana came out), but it looks really nice when printed.

There are a few other nice open source fonts out there. Gentium, also hosted by SIL, is another very attractive font.

If you like Verdana, Tahoma, Georgia, and would like Comic Sans (and a couple others, such as Microsoft's take on Times Roman and Microsoft's Helvetica clone Arial), you can easily install them in Linux, since the fonts are a free download.

Use LaTex. Except for the often limited fonts, it is vastly superior to an word processor, because a word processor is not the write tool to create real documents. We have know that for many years. That is why people bought pagemaker. And I think the lack of fonts forces people to create compelling content. LaTex is free, there are many good books,and if you do have a hankering to code, you can always play with Tex.

LaTeX has limited fonts, but if you use XeTeX (which uses LaTeX), you can not only use all the LaTeX stuff, but also any TrueType or OpenType font, and native unicode support as well. This is a godsend for typesetting anything that includes words or characters not in English, or just for people who are picky about typography. My personal favorite font is the open source SIL Gentium family, which is not only much more beautiful and readable than Times, but contains a fuller character set that makes it compatible with many more languages. Once you start writing documents with XeTeX and nicer fonts, you see how lacking word processors are for good typography and well-structured documents, and how self-limiting the concept is.

For newcomers to LaTeX and XeTeX, including packages and specifying options can be a bit time-consuming when you just want to get started with a basic A4-sized document. Here is the basic XeTeX file template I use for simple stuff. I'm picky about margins, line spacing, fonts, etc. so you know that it's a safe place to start out.
-

\documentclass[11pt]{article}

%%
% XeTeX packages
%%
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\usepackage{xltxtra}

%%
% Formatting packages
%%
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage[vcentering,dvips]{geometry}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}

\geometry{papersize={8.5in,11in},total={6.5in,8.8in}}

\pdfpagewidth 8.5in
\pdfpageheight 11in

% 10pt font: 1.15
% 11pt font: 1.1
\setstretch{1.1}

\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Gentium Basic}

\begin{document}

Some text...

\end{document}

Graphite is an open-source technology, designed for the specific purpose of non-Roman fonts with complex behaviors like contextual shaping, etc.
Unfortunately, the default font rendering toolkit in Linux, Pango is not a smart-font technology.
However, the pango-graphite library supports the smartfont technology if fonts are authored with the appropriate tables.

I think that people need to share their experiences with designing smart fonts. This way, more projects know what are their options.

Graphite is an open-source technology, designed for the specific purpose of non-Roman fonts with complex behaviors like contextual shaping, etc.
Unfortunately, the default font rendering toolkit in Linux, Pango is not a smart-font technology.
However, the pango-graphite library supports the smartfont technology if fonts are authored with the appropriate tables.

I think that people need to share their experiences with designing smart fonts. This way, more projects know what are their options.

Graphite is an open-source technology, designed for the specific purpose of non-Roman fonts with complex behaviors like contextual shaping, etc.
Unfortunately, the default font rendering toolkit in Linux, Pango is not a smart-font technology.
However, the pango-graphite library supports the smartfont technology if fonts are authored with the appropriate tables.

I think that people need to share their experiences with designing smart fonts. This way, more projects know what are their options.

Graphite is an open-source technology, designed for the specific purpose of non-Roman fonts with complex behaviors like contextual shaping, etc.
Unfortunately, the default font rendering toolkit in Linux, Pango is not a smart-font technology.
However, the pango-graphite library supports the smartfont technology if fonts are authored with the appropriate tables.

I think that people need to share their experiences with designing smart fonts. This way, more projects know what are their options.

Computer Modern can be a bit too light on the page for some uses.

For some high quality fonts check out the SIL website. The Doulos and Gentium font are excellent.

Computer Modern can be a bit too light on the page for some uses.

For some high quality fonts check out the SIL website. The Doulos and Gentium font are excellent.

Computer Modern can be a bit too light on the page for some uses.

For some high quality fonts check out the SIL website. The Doulos and Gentium font are excellent.

These could be considered as a form of echo question. Consider the example:

"I ate an entire bowl of thumbtacks."
"You ate an entire bowl of thumbtacks?"
"Yes."

Here the repair that's typically assumed to be part of echo questions is the entire sentence (which would likely be seen a semantically aberrant). There's no structural change to the sentence with the question mark (modulo some theory about hidden movement which I don't feel like working out). You'd probably hear an intonational change in speech.

a relevant link

I said nothing about the font handling process or font data formats. I said that the *results* are good. Sheesh.

If the Computer Modern font does not please your eyes, you can get any of the 35 standard PostScript fonts with one puny usepackage statement (e.g. \usepackage{times}). The procedure for installing arbitrary TrueType or PostScript fonts is a bit more involved but there are tools and walkthroughs available. See also http://www.tug.org/fonts/.

There are TeX forks like XeTeX that can handle modern digital fonts automatically.

--Bud

Regarding the awkward font mechanism, have a look at Xe(La)TeX: http://scripts.sil.org/xetex (or the upcoming luaTeX, http://www.luatex.org/).

For an experimental from-scratch replacement, look at Ant, http://ant.berlios.de/

Concerning bibliographies, the biblatex package is moving things forward (together with the many bibtex-aware bibliography managers). Graphics have gotten a big helper since the inception of the pgf/TikZ packages (for info about packages, see http://www.ctan.org/)

A lot of good editors are around to lighten the (not-so-heavy) code burden: emacs, kile, winedt, texshop, ...

If you want things to be simpler, but still get acceptably typeset (math/science) stuff, you're currently out of luck.

So could LaTeX be retrofitted to use TrueType for everything

Actually, something like that has been done already:
XeTeX

"I'm looking for a document processor (not a word processor) that is a viable replacement for LaTeX, possessing all of its advantages â" consistency between text and math text, automated cross references, direct PDF creation, etc. â""

ConTeXt? Like LaTeX, but perhaps better in many aspects?

"but that is not stuck in the 1980s with the compiler metaphor"

Sorry, no help here.

"and weird font technology."

Oh, somebody cruel has forbidden you to use XeTeX, write in UTF-8 and use OpenType fonts directly from your system? Shame on them!

First off the font system is purely a legacy thing, since Tex predates pretty much all other currently popular font tech. So could LaTeX be retrofitted to use TrueType for everything? Probably. In a 100% backwards compatible way?

Yes. This is called XeTeX (and XeLaTeX, the LaTeX equivalent, comes with it). It is developed on Mac OS X, so it uses ATSUI to access system TrueType or PostScript fonts. It is also ported to Linux, accessing font using fontconfig and Freetype.

XeTeX (and XeLaTeX) uses unicode, Open Type and AAT fonts -- so the miracle is already present. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX and http://scripts.sil.org/xetex .

First of all, you have zero chance of finding anything better than LaTeX for mathematical/scientific typesetting. However, there are ways of solving lots of the problems you mention without chucking LaTeX out the window.

1. Frustrated that you're constantly having to download and install new packages, fonts, etc.? Try the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink distribution, TeX Live. If you're running Mac OS X, there's a great Mac-specific version of TeX Live called MacTeX, which also includes a number of front-end apps for editing, managing bibliographies, spell-checking, etc.
2. Hate the standard (La)TeX font, Computer Modern? You're not alone. For free, math-capable fonts (most of which are included in TeX Live/MacTeX), check out this illustrated survey. If you want the ability to use OpenType and other installed fonts on your system, as well as foreign language scripts, unicode, and other modern font features, check out the wonderful Xe(La)TeX and its fontspec package, both included in TeX Live/MacTeX (of course)
3. Want the ability to do real programming in (La)TeX, with a full scripting language? Check out LuaTeX (although it's still very much a work in progress).
4. Want a good LaTeX front-end/editor? IMHO, Scientific Word and Lyx try to hide the complexity behind a WYSIWYG interface -- but this makes things even more confusing, because the complexity is still there, but now it's invisible, so it's impossible to diagnose why your document doesn't look the way you want. What you really want is a text-editor with built-in templates, push-button PDF compiling, and other TeX-specific features. One of the most popular editors (justly so) is TeXShop, for Mac OS X. A cross-platform program called TeXWorks is in development (led by Jonathan Kew, who developed XeTeX), and promises to bring TeXShop's advantages to all platforms. If (like me) you're wedded to Emacs, there's the fantastic AUCTeX editing mode for all things TeX-related.
5. Read LaTeX books designed for users, not developers or those interested in the "theory" of typesetting. This means, in my opinion, to stay away from anything with "Knuth" in the byline. I really like Leslie Lamport's introductory book on LaTeX, which you should be able to track down at almost any university library if you don't want to buy it.

Above all, be patient, and be open to learning. It's understandable that you want to do powerful and flexible document processing, without having to learn a whole bunch of commands. Unfortunately, this has a lot of similarity with people who want to program computers without learning a programming language. ("Why can't the computer just understand what I want it to do, in plain English?") Any program powerful enough to do everything you want is also powerful enough to do lots of things you don't want -- and because the computer can't read your mind, you have to learn how to tell it exactly what you want.

Cheers,
IT

So could LaTeX be retrofitted to use TrueType for everything?

Yes. It's called XeTeX, and it's brilliant.

At first I thought the talks is about this Graphite, but it made no sense. They should refrain from giving such nice names to Java libraries! People will only get confused. :-)

Gentium. It's released under the Open Font License, which I believe is "free" (by the FSF's definition).

It was also designed with many extended Latin characters, allowing ethnic groups across the world to produce documents typeset in Gentium. (I mean, just look at all these diacritics!)

Say what you want about the organization that produced these (SIL International), but this is a good-looking, high-quality typeface, which fits your criteria perfectly.

Gentium. It's released under the Open Font License, which I believe is "free" (by the FSF's definition).

It was also designed with many extended Latin characters, allowing ethnic groups across the world to produce documents typeset in Gentium. (I mean, just look at all these diacritics!)

Say what you want about the organization that produced these (SIL International), but this is a good-looking, high-quality typeface, which fits your criteria perfectly.

They discredited linguistics as a science in many countries of Asia, Africa and South America - especially through their missionary work and their connections to US governmental agencies (e.g. CIA) and US corporations. That's not the SIL alone, but they are the biggest and most powerful organization of that kind. And, they actually carry linguistics in their name. You can't work as a linguist in many countries without being permanently considered as a missionary or worse.

Because of their religious and political activity they were thrown out of several Latin American states where they acted much more aggressively than in Africa and Asia. (There are several books on that subject, but I can't tell which is actually good. The SIL says - of course - none.)

To sum it up, they use science as a cover for their religious-political agenda - as a scientist that makes me very angry.

But to be fair, their fonts (and XeTeX for that matter) are great stuff and a lot of people associated with them do respectable, even tremendous, work.

They discredited linguistics as a science in many countries of Asia, Africa and South America - especially through their missionary work and their connections to US governmental agencies (e.g. CIA) and US corporations. That's not the SIL alone, but they are the biggest and most powerful organization of that kind. And, they actually carry linguistics in their name. You can't work as a linguist in many countries without being permanently considered as a missionary or worse.

Because of their religious and political activity they were thrown out of several Latin American states where they acted much more aggressively than in Africa and Asia. (There are several books on that subject, but I can't tell which is actually good. The SIL says - of course - none.)

To sum it up, they use science as a cover for their religious-political agenda - as a scientist that makes me very angry.

But to be fair, their fonts (and XeTeX for that matter) are great stuff and a lot of people associated with them do respectable, even tremendous, work.

Why are they doing this? There's a nice FLOSS license for fonts: the OFL.

As a linguist I do not like the SIL as a institution, but their fonts and the license under which the fonts are distributed are without any doubt great.

I doubt many get it, so in the interests of general education, a quick linky:

ablative

WTF is a 'case' and why should I care?

The dependency on restricted non-modifiable fonts for web and print needs to be reduced....
Every script should have a free as in freedom working implementation.

Thankfully there are efforts underway to create a common open font set for the free desktop:
Check out the growing collection of open fonts released on the Unifont fontguide and the OFL font catalog". The freedesktop wiki lists the beginnings of a common open font set . The page needs updating though as some fonts have been released/freed since the last change.

We now have the community-approved license for fonts: the Open Font License , a growing community of open font designers a community of distribution packagers and a growing toolkit to do font design collaboratively.

Let's see what happens.

The dependency on restricted non-modifiable fonts for web and print needs to be reduced....
Every script should have a free as in freedom working implementation.

Thankfully there are efforts underway to create a common open font set for the free desktop:
Check out the growing collection of open fonts released on the Unifont fontguide and the OFL font catalog". The freedesktop wiki lists the beginnings of a common open font set . The page needs updating though as some fonts have been released/freed since the last change.

We now have the community-approved license for fonts: the Open Font License , a growing community of open font designers a community of distribution packagers and a growing toolkit to do font design collaboratively.

Let's see what happens.

AFAIK Corel PhotoPaint, Ulead PhotoImpact and PaintShop Pro don't have PhotoShop's Healing Brush or support for multi-channel images.

CorelDRAW isn't available in an up-to-date version for Mac OS X.

Adobe now owns FreeHand has ceased updating it and is dismantling it for patents and features to use in InDesign and Illustrator (which really hurts --- I really wish that Adobe owning it had been disallowed by the FTC again). I'd really like to see an alternative develop and the best alternative I can see is Cenon, http://www.cenon.info/ --- see my post http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.gnustep.discuss /msg/5593b1cb0ef1feef

While I agree with the motives behind your post, the cold, hard reality is that Adobe is moving into having a monopoly on graphic design applications / tools and technologies (and more important, patents, including UI patents).

It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't doing such a poor job of providing efficient user interfaces and features:

  - the layer palette in InDesign and Illustrator takes quite a bit more clicking / dragging as is really necessary
  - InDesign is sorely lacking in long document features --- still no support for switching number of columns in a text frame, index formatting is severely limited &c.
  - PhotoShop still has weird UI / implementation issues --- choose multi-channel mode and type layers are no longer an option

and their up-dating of the Macromedia apps which they are keeping has been limited, most notably, no OpenType or Unicode support.

Fortunately there are interesting tools like XeTeX, http://scripts.sil.org/xetex which allow me to avoid using InDesign and Quark save for when absolutely necessary at work.

William

To be fair, there's a Unicode version of TeX called Omega or some such. I'd doubtless have found it very useful if I'd ever managed to get it to work at all.

Take a look at XeTeX. It installed without a hitch on my computer (ppc debian) once I altered the Debian control stuff to compile against the TeXLive TeX packages rather than teTeX. Or if you run on a more normal platform (x86 ubuntu/debian/SuSE, MacOS X, maybe Windows) there's precompiled packages for you. It will use any OpenType (or TTF, or on OSX those Apple fonts) font you've got installed on your computer with complete (low-level) access to the special features, or higher-level access to most stuff via the fontspec LaTeX package. I quite happily no longer bother pissfarting around with stupid font packages. The only disadvantage I've found from XeTeX is that because it uses xdvipdfmx to convert to PDF you can't get special features from pdfTeX, and that it has the potential to make your input files platform-specific.

As for Omega, it's a dead end; AFAIK what it's given us will at some point be intergrated along with the scripting language lua and pdfTeX into something called LuaTeX. I might be mistaken on that front.

If evolution is true, you'd agree that God did not create Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, right?

Not necessarily. First of all, many people (clergy, theologians, etc) believe the story of Adam and Eve to be a parable . Even if one does choose to believe that Adam and Eve were real people, why is it impossible to believe that God created them through the process of evolution as s/he has done with all living things? Is it not possible that the authors of the parables/stories of Adam and Eve lacked the understanding or the ability to articulate HOW god made them? Could it not also be possible that despite being able to accurately describe HOW god created them, that they still existed even though they may have been created through the process of evolution (which again, is the process that god started)? While it's not something that I believe, I can see that a person might be able to make this leap of faith as easily as believing that they were made from dust.


If there is no original sin, then what was Jesus sent to save us from?

This is another one of those areas with many interpretations, even within the christian community. No one seems to be able to explain how Jesus' being "sent" to earth saved us from anything. As a recovering Catholic who endured 12 years of Catholic school and even has clergy in the family, no one has been able to articulate this idea. This is one of those, "god works in mysterious ways" areas that just doesn't cut the mustard for me (admitting that this is my choice to not accept this, not saying that no one should believe it). The point is, since there isn't a clear idea of the correlation between the existence of Original Sin and Jesus' arrival/departure from earth, and since Original Sin is still believed to exist (otherwise why would there be baptism?), why should the manner in which Original Sin is thought to have begun call into question whether christians still live their lives according to the major tenets of their faith?

I guess I'm saying that just because it's possible that god made Adam and Eve through the process of evolution shouldn't necessarily be construed to mean that the message (literal or not) of their story shouldn't still hold up, nor should it mean that the ideals of the religion ("love thy neighbor", "thou shalt not kill", etc) should be somehow invalidated. I do not think that it is the goal of science to undo or disprove god. I think the point of science is to explore the unknown and try to understand it which often puts us in the realm of things that had previously been attributed to god. It is not at attempt to attribute these phenomena to someone/something OTHER than god, merely to understand the mechanics of the process and leave the individual the right to decided whether s/he believes that god is ultimately behind the process "turning the gears" or not.

Just my opinion.

I don't know about getting paid programming work out of your free time, but I can tell you about getting fruitful personal projects: a personal project would only motivate you if it solves your own problems.

Here is what I do on my free time and why I do it.

Since I'm a graduate student, I'm pretty acquainted with LaTeX because my job (writing papers) depends on it. So I agreed to typeset a book written by a friend, in Chinese. For that, I'm using XeTeX, which is an extension of TeX that has very good multilingual and font support. However, I've noticed a typesetting trick or two from professionally published Chinese books, so I've been spending my time figuring out how to write TeX macros to accomplish that.

The motivation is to deliver what I promised to my friend, and the end product (the macros I write) is something I can share with the community one day.

Another example is a "linkiconv" program that I wrote. I have some files whose names were in some legacy character encoding, be it latin1, big-5, or something else. Nowadays I standardize on utf-8, so I wrote a program to convert file name encodings for me in order for the names to show up correctly.

This program is not released because I'm not happy with the fact that it is written in Perl, and that it requires Text::Iconv module to work. I don't expect many people to install that, and I think Perl is overkill for what I try to do here. I'd like to have a similar program written in C to link with libiconv directly.

However, my own problem has been solved, so rewritting the program in C never happened.

Why not try XeTeX, friend. It just made the jump from OS X to Linux and the developer is extremely helpful and responsive.

The point of this is that "gender" doesn't make so much sense as a grammatical term

Sure it does. For Linguists gender refers to a specific type of noun class system which classifies nouns into 2 or 3 of masculine, feminine, and neuter. As you and your link correctly state, the Dyirbal examples are not 'genders' but 'noun classes'. That doesn't change the fact that the German noun class system is based on grammatical gender.

(I've never understood the rationale for "Das Mädchen" in German. Probably because there is no rationale.)

I'm afraid there is a rationale, though it's not particularly rational ;-) In German all dimunitives created -chen and -lein are neuter. 'Mädchen' comes from 'Mägdchen', the diminutive of 'Magd', so it essentially means "little maid". It's the same with 'Das Männlein', "the little man".

-chris

The point of this is that "gender" doesn't make so much sense as a grammatical term

Sure it does. For Linguists gender refers to a specific type of noun class system which classifies nouns into 2 or 3 of masculine, feminine, and neuter. As you and your link correctly state, the Dyirbal examples are not 'genders' but 'noun classes'. That doesn't change the fact that the German noun class system is based on grammatical gender.

(I've never understood the rationale for "Das Mädchen" in German. Probably because there is no rationale.)

I'm afraid there is a rationale, though it's not particularly rational ;-) In German all dimunitives created -chen and -lein are neuter. 'Mädchen' comes from 'Mägdchen', the diminutive of 'Magd', so it essentially means "little maid". It's the same with 'Das Männlein', "the little man".

-chris

Skipping my previous post, could you comment on this:
Font Licensing and Protection Details

Mac solutions rock: TeXShop + XeTeX is a powerful combination. LaTeX simply can't be beat for consistency and ease of use once the basics are put to memory.

Non-Roman script support is coming. Check out http://scripts.sil.org/OOo_20_graphite

That's crazy talk. I've used XeTeX to write Chinese for years.

Screenshot of Chinese/Japanese Unicode support.

All the beauty of TeX, all the ease of unicode.

That's crazy talk. I've used XeTeX to write Chinese for years.

Screenshot of Chinese/Japanese Unicode support.

All the beauty of TeX, all the ease of unicode.