“Ша” (Ш) като “Шин” (ש)
23. November 2009 – 02:48Малко известна подробност (сред българите, иначе уикипедия я споменава) за произхода на буквата "Ш": най-вероятно е взаимствана от ש (Шин) в иврит. Примерите са от Linux Libertine.
Die neue (Typo-)Epidemie: Ligaturen an den Wortfugen
23. November 2009 – 02:18Die automatische Verwendung von Ligaturen ist in den gängigen DTP-Programmen, dank OpenType, eine Frage des Häkchen-Setzens geworden. Demzufolge gibt es neuerdings kaum ein Druckwerk, das ohne dieses "coole Feature" auskommt. Der Haken an der Sache mit dem Häkchen liegt aber in der deutschen Rechtschreibung. Denn sie bestimmt, kurz gesagt, dass keine Ligaturen an den Wortfugen gesetzt werden dürfen. Während der TeX-Quelltext Listen- (rmligs) oder Silben-basiert (ligatex) bereinigt werden kann, scheint die Ligaturentrennung für InDesign & Co. (hier und hier) eine ziemlich aufwändige Gelegenheit zu sein. Und so breitet sich die Cool-Feature-Plage mit den Wortfugenligaturen in gigantischen Ausmaßen aus. Keinen Verlagshersteller und keinen Lektor scheint diese Art des Analphabetentums zu stören, nein schon "Auflage" im Impressum wird mit der falschen Ligatur gesetzt. Fazit: InDesign & Co. sind für das deutschsprachige Werk- und Mengensatz ungeeignet! PS Ich lese zur Zeit ein Taschenbuch, das in Minion mit Ligaturen an den Wortfugen gesetzt ist. ...
Arial’s strike on Helvetica in “JPod”
5. Oktober 2009 – 11:34Looking at my "JPod" paperback I was shocked to see that they used Arial instead of Helvetica. Of course this can't be intended, because Helvetica is the Coupland font. I suppose, somewhere on the workflow from the "graphic-designer" to the printing device the whole Arial-Helvetica-exchange-madness went berserk. And no one even realized it!
\include and missing file
28. Juli 2009 – 15:09If you try to \input a non-existing file, you get an error and if in interactive mode, you are prompting to type a new filename. But if you do the same with \include, no error occurs, just a little warning "No file ...". This behaviour, although documented, is sometimes not optimal if one wants to make sure that no file is lost without checking the logfiles. \include uses \@input@ in its definition to load a file and \@input@ is defined as \def\@input@#1{\InputIfFileExists{#1}{}{\typeout{No file #1.}}} The simplest way to change \@input@ ist to \let it to \@iinput, the macro, which issues an error if file is not found. \let\@input@\@iinput Since \@input@ is not only used in the \include macro, this redefinition affects the input of .fd and .bbl files. You can see this as some kind of strict (or final, because of BibTeX) mode LaTeX, producing error on missing files. Of course, we can redefine ...
Database Publishing with LaTeX and hyperref
28. Juli 2009 – 00:43We had to produce a book catalogue from publisher's data. The layout was also predefined. We got a Word file with fields-like data: #001 Springer, Anne; Münch, Karsten; Munz, Dietrich (Hg.) #002 Sexualitäten #003 Eine Publikation der DGPT #004 #005 Bestellnr.: 854 #006 ISBN 978-3-89806-854-3 #007 2008 #006 455 Seiten #006 Gebunden #008 ? (D) 39,90 #009 Die Autorinnen und Autoren dieses Bandes reflektieren aus heutiger Sicht mit unterschiedlichen Perspektiven ein zentrales Thema der Psychoanalyse in Überlegungen zur Theorie und Behandlungstechnik: die Sexualität. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Aktualität des Triebkonzepts. #010 #011 9783898068543 After automatic cleaning and processing the file, we produced a LaTeX formated data: \begin{eintrag} \autor{\Index{Springer, Anne}; \Index{Münch, Karsten}; \Index{Munz, Dietrich} (Hg.)} \titel{Sexualitäten}{854} \subtitel{Eine Publikation der DGPT} \artnr{854} \isbn{978-3-89806-854-3} \jahr{2008} \sechs{455~S.} \sechs{Gebunden} \preis{€~(D)~39,90} \beschreibung{Die Autorinnen und Autoren dieses Bandes reflektieren aus heutiger Sicht mit unterschiedlichen Perspektiven ein zentrales Thema der Psychoanalyse in Überlegungen zur Theorie und Behandlungstechnik: die Sexualität. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Aktualität des Triebkonzepts.} \cover{9783898068543} \end{eintrag} The pictures for the book covers were delivered as jpeg files. We used ImageMagic ...
Index Processing – the Hard Way
17. Juli 2009 – 12:17We had a book to set from a translated original. The index entries were taken also from the first book, translated and put in a list. So, in the first preview of the new book we set the index list as enumerate and asked the lector to mark the text with the entry numbers for index generation: We finally received a heavy marked text as commented PDF with the index number in each comment. Almost every page looked like this: The index had to be generated very quickly and obviously there was no way to do that by marking each entry in the source TeX file. Fortunately it was confirmed, that the book preview is OK and no page should change. We used the Acrobat feature of summarizing the comments in one PDF file to merge all the comments with the page numbers: We converted the PDF file with the comments to ...
Typesetting a Dictionary with LaTeX
10. Juli 2009 – 10:15As I mentioned in the previous post, we typesetted recently a german-albanian dictionary. It is an easy job with LaTeX. The most interestings and challenging points were: create new phonetic glyphs from the base font create albanian hyphenation patterns based on the turkish ones with some additions like not to break on digraphs vertical bars and underrules used in the main entry words for showing morphology and intonation disappear (automagically) in the running head, so there is only the whole word typesetted (example below) The main work actually was to clear and normalize the Word sources. Emacs did a good job as usually.
Creating Glyphs
10. März 2009 – 13:50For a dictionary project we used lots of phonetic glyphs. The most of them can be made from an ordinary font just by transforming (rotating, mirroring) a glyph or attach an accent to it. There is also the "ezh" character, and unfortunately the Minion fonts used didn't have it, but the similar "yogh". Michael Everson has an interresting article about yogh vs. ezh here. So I combined "z" and "yogh" to produce the real "ezh". BTW, the TIPA-Fonts have only a glyph named "yogh", but it looks like "ezh" anyway.
Database Publishing with ConTeXt
24. Dezember 2008 – 03:06The new catalogues arrived last week. More than 3000 pages from ca. 35 MB textual data typesetted with ConTeXt . Only the volume with the index (discussed here and here) is done fully automatically. The other three volumes required sometimes manual placement adjustment of the ads. A sample spread is shown below.