Quote:
Originally Posted by frabjous
If different languages have such radically different typographical needs, I don't see that there would need to be, or even should be, a single standard for books published in all languages. If car manufacturers can make a separate version for each country, and in the US, sometimes different ones for different states, then surely, reader device manufacturers can put different firmwares/renderers, etc., in devices sold in different markets. (And I'd hope they offer ways to customize one's own firmware if a multilingual reader needed more than one renderer, even if it were impossible to use all.) I also would hope that the standard could be flexible enough to incorporate things that should be handled in different ways. Pie in the sky, perhaps.
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Well... I do feel so.
As long as I have to order from Europe the same damn Fisher Price toys being sold in the local Walmart, because I want the damn plush dog to count in Hungarian rather than English... instead of being able to (as you rightly suggest in the case of eBook reader devices) simply update/change the firmware... this seems unlikely to me.
And, yes, the key is multilingualism. Multilingualism that is, by the way, the norm in humans, as there are more multilingual people in the world than monolingual ones.
It seems to me that your approach, separately from whatever other merits or failings it may have, firmly places (potential) readers into the hands/mercy of manufacturers that have little tangible motivation to even update firmware, never mind create endless variations thereof for a myriad different scripts and languages.
And while doubtless your approach would not leave disenfranchised readers of Hanzi, whether vertical or horizontal, what is the likelihood of the particulars of the Yi script being supported? Or of the Chuvash language? (Consider these rhetorical questions relevant more for their type than for their specific content... I do not know what complications there would be with either the Yi script or with Chuvash... but the world is full of languages that are probably too minor for a large multinational corporation to ever care to do much work to support.)
Not to mention stuff that starts heading toward the fanciful... how much will Sony work to professionally support all the peculiarities of ancient/koine Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, and Syriac for biblical/koranic/classical scholarship?
How much will they work to support either Etruscan or Runic Hungarian (or Greek or Latin, for that matter) in boustrophedon? Will I be able to implement a fanciful way of writing modern English with Old English Runes? Will there be full and professional support for all the different scripts that Albanian has been written with in recent memory (and each of which doubtless has books originally written/prepared/published using it)? How high a priority will Inuktitut support be for them? It is a co-official language of one of Canada's provinces... along with it's related language/dialect Inuinnaqtun which may have quirks of its own.
And then there's the Klingon, Tengwar, et cetera tomfoolery. And will there only be a firmware for writing Quenya with Tengwar? Or both Quenya and Sindarin? Or even English? Will Dutch written with Tengwar never be supported?
And the voynich manuscript?
Nothing that I mentioned is a problem to do with real paper
or with PDF, assuming the author/typesetter knows what they want. However it could very easily become all but impossible to do (or at least, to do well) using a system where most of the work is left to the display engine... which knows only what the proprietor put money in.
Unless you see firmware going open source in a big way... but part of me thinks that even then, writing firmware is a good deal greater a barrier to entry than simply learning LaTeX and getting the right fonts. The latter a determined language revivalist could far more readily do than the former, unless they already have a software development backgrounds.
- Ahi