I do, however, still have hard copies of the essays I wrote. Lord, how the International Phonetic Alphabet challenged me and my dot-matrix printer! When typing my essays, I left loads of gaps and entered all the "funny characters" and difficult lexically-phonological equations in careful ink.
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| I understood this, once. |
Twenty-two years later I have most of the world's knowledge available via my phone, my tablet, my laptop, and my PC. But I'm still quite tempted by the inking option, when it comes to funny /kærıktɘrz/.
Parenthetically, I have a learned brother who has almost certainly been a master in this arcane area of knowledge for several decades - but if there's one thing I've discovered recently, it's that if you can't ask the right question, the answer, however correct, will be inapplicable at best and incomprehensible at worst.
Anyway anyway, unlike the 80s, these days I'm generally using neither WordStar nor WordMaster nor WordPerfect to write (remember them, anyone?). Most of what I write is in the single-source database tool Author-it - and it's there that things get a little complicated. Marvellous as it is to be able to reuse info frantically AND publish to several formats - Word, web, etc. (without having to be an XML guru, brother dear), I have to admit that special characters have taken years off my life - because you think you've got the character Right when you're writing, but then when you publish your content into web format, it's a question mark or a little box or something equally Wrong. And so then you have a look at the output in another browser and it's Right - or it's still Wrong but Differently.
One of the things I've inferred from my recent reading is that we English speakers, ironically enough, have been so cushioned in our funny character experiences that we don't know what we don't know. Lots of funny characters we've entered over the years have worked - but only thanks to special rules written to cater to our ignorance. Thanks Microsoft, for trying to make things easier for English speakers - you've fudged things so that some characters appear correctly in your programs even if we've mucked things up under the bonnet... which would be truly fantastic if writers could control which browser users use...
Meanwhile, most of the world's population uses funny characters every day, and long ago came to grips with the intricacies of writing and publishing in Arabic/French/Hindi and the like. But I did have to laugh when I read this article on Wikipedia and some of the cited characters were little boxes. It made me feel - well - not alone.
Anyhoo, after numerous set-backs (eureka moments followed by unexpected and entirely unwanted results), I think I have attained a useful (albeit low) level of understanding. BabelMap has become more sensible to me, and less strange. I (sort of) understand blocks. I'm publishing Author-it content and it's Right - even on the iPad!
Author-it users: if you comment on this blog entry (without ridiculing my slowness), I might even tell you what I've learnt...
