English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

18:00

Okay, I am not getting any closer to an impression of these practical issues you mention.

tchrist

When I turned over my “manuscript” to production, I said that if they did a good job, I would send them a copy of Bringhurst.

And that if they did a poor job, I would send them two copies of Bringhurst.

I sent them five.

Cerberus

@Robusto Why would they be razor-thin if you have it printed yourself? It's cheap. My friend did it with a book that only his friends would want to read.

@tchrist They did five good jobs?

Or three good jobs and one bad?

Robusto

@Cerberus I'm just saying there's not a lot of money to be made, so why pay someone a lot of money to do something you could do yourself?

tchrist

Apply a fourth-level trans-superlative degree to bad.

For starters, they were trying to use a font that supported little more than ASCII.

Cerberus

@Robusto I thought you were arguing for paying 95 % of your revenue to a publisher? I was suggesting a copy editor instead; but I agree, I would do it myself.

tchrist

18:02

In a book that treats quite seriously with matters of Unicode.

Cerberus

Okay, we're not getting any further. I remain completely unconvinced, but I am sure you have reasons that seem convincing to you. I just do not have access to them.

tchrist

Then they were using software that couldn’t hyphenate better than random placement by some Japanese speaker unfamiliar with English hyphenation patterns.

Which is in fact what they did.

@Cerberus I could ruin you.

In the way that the jury told to disregard the previous evidence is ruined.

Cerberus

You could?

tchrist

Because you cannot unsee things.

Cerberus

Ruin me, then.

tchrist

18:04

I have never been as self-conscious about my handwriting as when I was inking in the caption for this comic.

Cerberus

However, note that examples of how bad your publisher was are actually arguments against your position.

@tchrist What's that? The C's have a bit of shite space?

Robusto

Haha, he said "shite space." Out of the mouths of doggies ...

Cerberus

If have this program for you that can solve it. It is called Word.

@Robusto Oh, haha...I meant white space. But this is better.

tchrist

C ITY OFFIC ES

In this tiny image, you do not notice it.

Cerberus

1 min ago, by Cerberus

If have this program for you that can solve it. It is called Word.

tchrist

18:07

It titles, it is miserable.

Bah!

Robusto

@Cerberus You really don't know who you're talking to here, do you? You think @tchrist is going to submit to the tyranny of MS Word?

tchrist

You do not really think a professional publisher actually uses that crap, do you?

Cerberus

Libre Office, then.

@tchrist You are begging the question.

tchrist

Their workflow is incredibly more complex than that.

They could not do their job.

Cerberus

I question the usefulness of professional publishers.

tchrist

18:08

And my distresses do not argue against anything, except incompetence.

Microsoft Word is utterly incapable of coping with Arno Pro.

And do you know why?

Do you really want to know why?

Very well, then. I shall tell you.

Cerberus

All right, I'll treat your statement that you need to give 95 % of your earnings to publishers are a black box of rationality.

tchrist

It is because it does not use kerning pairs.

It is an OpenType font with kerning classes.

Cerberus

What is Arno Pro, and why do you need it?

tchrist

And the fucking piece of shit from Microsoft has a static table size that is not big enough to load the whole table.

Arno Pro is an OpenType font in the Humanist tradition of printing’s first century designed by Robert Slimbach.

It is a pan-European font, covering Latin, Cyrillic, and polytonic Greek.

It has more sorts than any previous font.

Cerberus

@tchrist You can take a screen shot and use it as a picture?

Robusto

18:11

@Cerberus adobe.com/type/browser/landing/arno/arno.html

tchrist

And it is beautiful.

Cerberus

@Robusto That looks familiar.

@tchrist Why do you need it, and why is it worth 95 % of your revenue?

tchrist

Whatever.

Just use Courier New and go away.

Cerberus

Okay, still black box.

tchrist

Bec uase I w ould ra ther n o twrite than writesome thin g that look slikes hit.

Cerberus

18:13

If you feel you need all this, then I am sure you have good reasons.

I just don't understand any of them.

tchrist

Tread carefully, or I shall send you too a copy of Bringhurst.

And then you would.

Robusto

@tchrist There's a kern el of trut hint hat.

Cerberus

If you cannot convince me for an iota, then nobody can.

tchrist

I should like to be permitted to use an iota.

Robusto

@Cerberus How about an epsilon?

Cerberus

18:15

@tchrist You may. There.

@Robusto Let alone an epsilon.

user19161

@tchrist On Windows I would use Times New Roman, Arial and Courier New. On Linux, I would use Liberation Serif, Liberation Sans and Liberation Mono. They are metric compatible respectively.

cornbread ninja

I always miss the type conversations.

tchrist

my $dwarf = "Þórinn Eikinskjaldi";
my $search = "búsqueda";
my $measure = "Ångström";
my $how = "à contre-cœur";
my $motto = "👪 💗 🐪";
my @ɪsᴏ = qw( Latin1 Latin2 Latin15 );
my @μsoft = qw( cp852 cp1251 cp1252 );
my @鯉 = qw( koi8-f koi8-u koi8-r );
my $déjà_imprimée; # le nom d'une ville
my @ὑπέρμεγας = ( );
# Ok, now we’re just showing off :-)
my $ʇndʇno = uʍopəpᴉsdn($input);

user19161

@cornbreadninja There was none. I was just making a random remark as usual.

user19161

@Cerberus I use epsilons and deltas to represent small quantities.

cornbread ninja

18:18

@JasperLoy at what point does the randomness wane?

tchrist

Imagine reversing “crème brûlée” codepoint by codepoint. Assuming
normalization to NFD, you’d end up with “éel̂urb em̀erc” when you really want “eélûrb emèrc”.

Cerberus

@tchrist I can't see the motto thing.

tchrist

Boy that one shure is purdy!

user19161

@tchrist Tell that to Jon Purdy.

tchrist

@Cerberus Which is unacceptable, of course.

Cerberus

18:19

@JasperLoy I use hairs.

@tchrist What font do I need for that, and do I need it?

user19161

@Cerberus Don't pluck too many from your head!

tchrist

Do you need it?

Only to print my manuscript.

Cerberus

Then what are those characters?

I don't need smiley faces.

user19161

@cornbreadninja Anyway, the most beautiful font to me so far is Georgia.

tchrist

How do you like how “éel̂urb em̀erc” looks?

@Cerberus You miss the point.

user19161

18:21

How are you finding your new mod powers @sim?

cornbread ninja

@JasperLoy +1 for not saying Comic Sans.

Cerberus

@tchrist I had no idea what that line meant at all.

tchrist

The point is that you cannot just give somebody a technical manuscript and expect them to be able to print it out.

user19161

@cornbreadninja I used Comic Sans when I wrote letters to my friends in school.

Cerberus

@tchrist That's why I asked which characters you were using that you needed and that a self-printing website couldn't print.

My next question would be about work-arounds.

tchrist

18:23

    Allerød        Fabergé     Möbius         quinceañera   vis-à-vis
    après-ski      façade      moiré          Ragnarök      Zuñi
    Bokmål         fête        naïve          résumé        α-ketoisovaleric acid
    brassière      feuilleté   Niçoise        Schrödinger   (α-)lipoic acid
    caña           flügelhorn  piñon          Shijō         (β-)nornicotine
    crème          Gödelian    plaçage        soirée        ψ-ionone
    crêpe          jalapeño    prêt-à-porter  tapénade
    désœuvrement   Madrileño   Provençal      vicuña

If I gave them camera-ready PDF, anyone could print it.

That is not the point.

Cerberus

Those quotidian characters can be printed by any version of Word?

tchrist

The point is that nobody knows how to produce camera-ready PDF for a professionally produced book.

Cerberus

@tchrist Why not? What stops you from doing just that?

user19161

@tchrist LaTeX can certainly handle that.

Cerberus

You're using all sorts of unknown variables that are empty holes to me.

tchrist

18:24

It DOES NOT !@#$%% MATTER WHAT THE GOD!@#$ QUOTIDIANNESS OF THE CHARACTERS IS!

Cerberus

Like "professionally produced".

tchrist

This is a book about special characters.

Cerberus

Or which characters you need that are hard to print, and why you need them.

tchrist

It has to have them.

Cerberus

Ah.

tchrist

18:24

FFS

It is about complex modern technologies.

Cerberus

What if you just used images?

tchrist

Then it will not look right.

Because it will be random characters grabbed from random different fonts.

It will look like a bloody ransom note created from magazine headline clippings, all unalike.

Robusto

Speaking of special characters, what I hate is trying to copy my Mac-based iTunes music folders to a Windows-formatted drive. It fails on all the diacriticals.

Cerberus

@tchrist Why?

Can you see the characters correctly displayed together on your own computer?

tchrist

Because you have to pick characters from the same font.

Or closely related ones.

Does your font handle an arbitrary number of Unicode combining and enclosing characters applied to arbitrary code points?

No?

Then how the hell am I supposed to talk about that?

Cerberus

18:28

I'm afraid I do not understand any of this.

tchrist

if ("४५६७" =~ /(\d+)/) {

                "७¾çὯ";

Cerberus

What am I supposed to see?

tchrist

How similar do ȭ and ō̃ look?

And how legible?

They had better look damned similar, and differ only in the mark-application order.

Cerberus

They look different.

Just a bit small.

tchrist

Can you tell which is which, and what?

Tell me what either character is.

Cerberus

18:30

I needed to zoom in a bit, but now I can.

tchrist

Your choice.

Yes, and?

Cerberus

Oh, I see the diacritics are not placed correctly.

tchrist

DING DING DING! GIVE THAT DOG A BONE!

That my dear, is typography.

Cerberus

tchrist

Pretty damned shitty, isn't it?

That is not acceptable in print.

QED

Cerberus

18:32

Of course not, but what if you made a screen shot or something comparable?

tchrist

A screen shot of what?

Like you did?

Cerberus

Your computer must be able to handle those diacritics. So you can display it the way you want it to be displayed on your computer. So you could simply make a screen shot of that and use it as a picture in your book—if I may suggest something as naïve as this.

tchrist

Correctness aside, and just curious, but how do tschüß and TSCHÜẞ look to you? Or they a garment of one cloth woven, or are they a ransom note?

user19161

@tchrist I declare you have been infected with the QED virus in this chat.

tchrist

Cause I will bet you the last character in each word is mangled the one with respect to the other.

Cerberus

18:34

tchrist

Nice.

I don’t print sans serifim.

Cerberus

Looks normal enough to me?

tchrist

Yes, those are fine.

Sauf les serifs.

user19161

@Cerberus Not much.

tchrist

And it looks nothing like what I have here, either.

Cerberus

18:35

Il n'y en a aucun.

tchrist

The problems are legion.

@Cerberus Ça y est.

Cerberus

2 mins ago, by Cerberus

Your computer must be able to handle those diacritics. So you can display it the way you want it to be displayed on your computer. So you could simply make a screen shot of that and use it as a picture in your book—if I may suggest something as naïve as this.

tchrist

bangs head

Cerberus

I'm just saying I don't understand anything of your position or your arguments or whatever.

tchrist

I am truly sorry. Honestly.

Even if I were to make a picture, how do people search?

Cerberus

18:37

Do they need to search?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus A screen-shot of text would almost invariable be a terrible book.

cornbread ninja

drag picture to GIS in an HTML5 browser

Cerberus

I thought we were talking about printing books?

tchrist

I spent 4 months of my life fighting with this shit every single day, and I wasn't supposed to even concern myself with it.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

So I have a coworker who recently got a Galaxy Nexus. Then his carrier said he was eligible for a free hardware upgrade so they gave him a Galaxy S III. So he just gave me the GN, for free.

Cerberus

18:38

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Just the bits of special character, not everything.

tchrist

But I refused to affix my name to something that embarrassed me to regard.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus That'd be worse, actually

Cerberus

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 What!?

Your system is weird!

tchrist

The book is published in many, many different formats.

It is printed, yes.

It is also published in many ebook formats.

But the damned publishing software was written by Japanese people to produce novel-type books, not technical works.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus But actually there have been systems that used bitmap fonts, which is essentially what you're talking about.

tchrist

18:40

And there were millions of bugs, stuff that was even fixed-in-the-next-release, buy you cannot disrupt a production chain to upgrade in the middle of the schedule. It simply cannot be done.

Cerberus

All right, if you need searchable text and special characters, then your digital versions may be difficult to get right. So publisher can do this? Even if they can, I doubt whether I would personally consider that worth 95 % of my revenue...

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus That's not all the publisher does

tchrist

Whatever. Just write man-pages in nroff in a constant-width font. Bye.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

They also market the book

They manage its inventory

They get it into stores

Cerberus

@tchrist So you're telling me about how horrible your publisher is to convince me, hehe.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

18:42

They have lots of people who work on any particular book, each applying different skills: typography, graphic design, editing, etc.

Cerberus

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 From what I hear, nothing they do is worth 95 % of your revenue, and they often do many, many things wrong that actually harm your sales.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

I have self-published a paper book and did all the work myself. I still only make about $1/copy because the sheer costs of printing are that high.

Cerberus

And for a novel I certainly wouldn't want to spend much on design or something. It's the text that matters, if you don't have such special requirements as Tchrist has.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus Depending on the book it is not always 95%. For example, the standard children's book is 10% to the "creators", the rest to the publishers.

user19161

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Maybe increase the price of the book.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

18:44

@JasperLoy I'd price myself out of the market.

It's already $12/book

Cerberus

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Still far too little.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

But I don't do much marketing so I don't have many sales.

Cerberus

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 What did you pay for printing?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus But it's not like self-publishing is some kind of panacea. My publishing costs for my book are like $10.50/book

I can set any price I want over that, but the printer takes a percentage or something.

Granted: that's micro-publishing. There are no economies of scale that can be had. However, the overhead is still high.

Cerberus

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I am not talking about that kind of printing.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

18:48

Anyway: I agree that publishers charge too much. However, I disagree that the publishing system makes no sense at all. It makes a lot of sense. If I were serious about my book I'd be shopping it around to publishers.

Cerberus

I am talking about the kind where your book is printed on demand.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus what kind of printing?

@Cerberus yes, that's what I use. lulu.com

it's print-on-demand.

user19161

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Is the profit you made from the book worth the time you spent on it?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Anyone can see what the costs are per-page for the different paper-types and formats. My book is 30 colour pages, perfect-bind paperback. Works about to about $10.50 USD base cost.

@JasperLoy No. I haven't made any profit at all. However I didn't make the book with the intention of making a profit, I just wanted to hold a finished book of my own in my hands. However, once it was finished, I figured "might as well register a domain and take this kinda seriously"

Cerberus

Lulu is not about cheaply printing a book and doing just that.

user19161

18:51

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Well, if you really enjoy it you could consider becoming a full-time author some day.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@JasperLoy Believe me, I think about doing just that a lot.

@Cerberus it's not?

Cerberus

And you were not printing a novel but lots of colour pictures, no?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 From the looks of it, it is about publishing as well?

Have you looked into websites that just take your Word document and print it cheaply, nothing more?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus They have lots of services. I am only using the print-on-demand service. They have a web-store, and they can make your book available in other stores (amazon, bricks-and-mortar stores, etc) for a fee.

Cerberus

This doesn't sound like a cheap printer.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus No. But a "word doc and nothing more" would probably make a terrible book. Word is pretty awful about putting text on a page.

Cerberus

18:54

> Camille Rose, Authored "Your Business Plan is LIKE ... - Through LightningSource.com it will cost you $6.00 per unit + $0.10 per page. But they don't offer your exact size. I just printed a book through them, perfect bound, full color and am really impressed with the print quality all my photos.

That is not too far off from what you paid.

I'm seeing prices around € 6 per book for 200 copies of 100 pages, A5.

boekvanmij.nl

Can't link to the results page.

RegDwight АΑA

@JSBձոգչ oh yes I did. I was listening to Slayer, thought you'd join in.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…