Localizable Sentences Experiment font support

William · June 3, 2011, 11:10am

I have used the Localizable Sentences 010 font to produce the following pdf.
locse010.pdf (15.9 KB)
I have found that a convenient way to think of the set of localizable sentences encoded as Unicode characters is as if they were elements of a constructed language, Language Y, a language that has no individual words only sentences and digits and a few phrases such as “Best regards,” that are followed by a name. Thinking of the set as elements of Language Y means that the private use language tag x-y can be used to refer to a string of one or more characters of Language Y, thus opening the possibility that XML (eXtensible Markup Language) language tool technologies can be used in constructing translation and localization dictionaries. For example, hopefully the information in the pdf could be used to construct XML-based language tool technology files using the x-y language tag and the en-gb-oed language tag.

William Overington

3 June 2011

William · June 3, 2011, 3:38pm

Here is a pdf that I have produced.
locse010_art.pdf (15.4 KB)
William Overington

3 June 2011

William · June 7, 2011, 12:43pm

Before clicking the link to the .swf file in this post, readers are advised to read the following post.

I have now produced a Flash .swf file, an animation made using Serif DrawPlus X4 and my Localizable Sentences 010 font. It is not interactive, it just builds up a message, in fact the same message that is shown in a still image in the fifth post in this Gallery thread entitled Localizable Sentences Experiment font support.

Before posting the following link here, I emailed a copy of the .swf file from one email address at btinternet.com to another email at btinternet.com and then used the virus checking software of the webmail and that reported as follows.

No virus threat detected

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/conversation_001.swf

The ftp program that I used to upload the file to our family webspace informs that the file is 10423 bytes.

William Overington

7 June 2011

William · June 10, 2011, 10:15am

I am now researching on the adding of some additional sentences to the set; sentences that I hope will be of practical use in real world situations.

The idea is that the system could be of use to people trying to find out information concerning family and friends who may have been involved in a disaster in another country, in those situations where communication through the language barrier is needed.

Example of use, the messages being here expressed as localized to English.

In transmission, each of the localizable sentences would be transmitted as one Unicode character. The names of the people and the email address would be transmitted as plain text as shown in the examples and would not be localized.

Enquiry email.

Is there any information about the following person please?
Margaret Gattenford
The person is female.
The name of the enquirer is as follows.
Albert Johnson
The email address of the enquirer is as follows.
[email protected]
The enquirer is the brother of the first person that was named.

Reply email.

The following question has been asked.
Is there any information about the following person please?
Margaret Gattenford
My answer is as follows.
The person is safe.

The communication uses eight localizable sentences, one of them twice. Two of the sentences are from the existing set; the other six are new.

Although six new localizable sentences are used in the above example emails, they are six from a larger set of new sentences, which set is not yet finalized, being designed to cover various situations. There is a balance between comprehensiveness of meaning conveying and keeping the number of sentences as small as is reasonable.

I hope that the idea is of interest.

William Overington

10 June 2011

William · June 13, 2011, 10:34am

The process of designing a collection of sentences and symbols to represent them is interesting.

I have produced a font in order to be able to test some of the designs. The font is not published as the glyphs have just been placed more or less arbitrarily in the plane 0 Private Use Area as a temporary measure as I continue to research which sentences to include in the collection and to design glyphs for them.

Here is a graphic. It is for the following sentence.

The person.is female.

The design has the following features.

As with all of the symbols for the set of localizable sentences it is of size 23 blocks wide by 7 blocks high, in the lower left corner of a space 24 blocks wide by 8 blocks high. Each block is 256 font units square.
The 23 blocks width is considered as divided up as 7+1+7+1+7.
The symbol in the leftmost area is specific to localizable sentences referring to a person who may be involved in a disaster. There is another design for localizable sentences about the enquirer.
The line along the top is, in the symbol for this particular sentence, used just to show that the various parts of the glyph are all part of the same glyph.
The circle in the centre refers to person.
The lozenge at the right refers to female. The lozenge is chosen based on the fact that in heraldry the armorial bearings of a lady are depicted on a lozenge. For the avoidance of doubt, in this system of symbols for localizable sentences, male is represented using a square.

William Overington

13 June 2011

William · June 13, 2011, 11:31am

Supplementary note of 10 August 2011

The designs of three of the glyphs were altered on 10 August 2011 and that is explained in a post of 10 August 2011 in this thread.

The three altered glyph designs are those for the following three sentences.

The enquirer is the husband of the first person that was named.

The enquirer is the brother of the first person that was named.

The enquirer is the sister of the first person that was named.

The text and illustrations of the original post continue unaltered after this supplementary note, so as to conserve the historical record.

End of supplementary note of 10 August 2011.

Here are five more glyphs.

Please note the use of the design in the leftmost area to refer to “The enquirer”.

The conversation scenario allows that the enquiry is about one or more people with one enquirer. Thus the use of the phrase “the first person that was named.”.

There are intended to be other localizable sentences where the relationship that is being specified is that of the second or later person in the list to the first person that was named. For those sentences the leftmost area has the same design as the symbol in the previous post in this thread and the sentences start with the phrase “The person”.

William Overington

13 June 2011

William · June 14, 2011, 6:18am

Here are the designs for the symbols for two of the localizable sentences that form the main structure of an enquiry.

The idea is that an enquiry would start with the following sentence, with the name following it.

Is there any information about the following person please?
Name of person in plain text

There could then be zero, one or more sentences about the person, such as the following, as appropriate to the particular enquiry.

The person is female.

After that, there could be zero, one or more sections of the following format.

Also, is there any information about the following person please?
Name of person in plain text

There could then be zero, one or more sentences about the person, as appropriate to the particular enquiry, together, optionally, with details of the relationship of the person to the first person that was named.

This linking back to the first person that was named is why there is a different sentence for asking about additional people after the first person that was named, and why that different sentence starts with the word Also.

After that, or before, the Also, is there any information about the following person please? sentence, there could be a section about the enquirer, with contact details, such as email address and telephone number, together with information about the relationship of the enquirer to the first person named.

William Overington

14 June 2011

William · June 14, 2011, 12:35pm

Some readers may be interested to know of the following issues with the design of the symbol glyphs.

At the time of writing, for some of the sentences that I have included in the set of sentences, I have not finalized a design for the symbol glyph.

One issue is what centre symbol to use for the following sentences about communications.

The name of the enquirer is as follows.
The email address of the enquirer is as follows.
The daytime landline telephone number of the enquirer is as follows.
The home landline telephone number of the enquirer is as follows.
The mobile telephone number of the enquirer is as follows.
The postal address of the enquirer is as follows.
The postal address of the enquirer is now completed.
Please convey the following message to the person.
The message to the person is now completed.

Please note that for those sentences where there could be more than one line of text that a sentence to signal the end of the lines of text is included.

I did try some experimental designs using a copy of the centre symbol for the sentences about hailing in the weather group of sentences as the centre symbol for these sentences. They looked quite good, yet I feel reluctant to use a symbol already used for sentences about the weather.

I also tried a star, copied from my Stardisc font and reduced in size, yet feel that it would not have a bold enough display and, if someone in an emergency were trying to draw the symbol with a pen then it could be a problem to do that.

The other issue is what centre symbol to use for the following sentences regarding providing information about a person.

The person is safe.
The person is injured.
The person is in hospital.
The person is missing.
There is no information about the person here at present.

With sentences providing request information about the person, I am happy to use a circle as the centre symbol.

For example in the following sentence.

The age of the person is as follows.

However, I feel that for providing up to date, after the disaster, information about the person that a different centre symbol should be used, one that would stand out if someone were looking through an unlocalized display of the message.

So, I am trying to devise some bold, original logos for the centre position, logos that display well and can also be straightforwardly drawn with a pen.

William Overington

14 June 2011

Edited on 16 June 2011 to correct a spelling mistake.

William · June 15, 2011, 9:02am

I have now produced a design.

Here is the glyph design for the sentence The name of the enquirer is as follows. showing the centre symbol in use.

Designing the centre symbol was interesting.

The available space is 1792 (namely 7 * 256) font units wide by 1280 (namely 5 * 256) font units high. It is a rectangle.

A circle occupies a 1280 font unit by 1280 font unit block centred in that rectangle.

I thought that a good design would be a circle with a line from upper left to lower right within the limits of the rectangle.

I copied the glyph for the sentence The enquirer is the father of the first person that was named.

I replaced the square with a circle.

Remembering that the circle is in a 5 by 5 block and that the available area is a 7 by 5 block and that the circle is horizontally centred in that block, I added a parallelogram with vertical sides, going from the top left corner of the box, to the right edge of the box, to the lower right corner of the box, to the left edge of the box and back to the top left corner of the box.

The bend dexter line produced in the font (that is, the black line from upper left to lower right that is displayed when the font is in use) needs to be 256 font units wide, so the non-corner points each need to be p pixels vertically from the corner, one downward, one upward.

In fact, it may be that people more skilled in fontmaking than me might say that due to optical effects that the diagonal line should be of some width different from the 256 font units width of the horizontals and verticals in the font, and maybe even that the horizontals and verticals need to be of different widths to look to a person as if they are the same width. I do not know enough about that as I would wish, just enough to suspect that making the diagonal line 256 font units wide is perhaps not the best way. However, wishing to proceed with my research I am at present making the width of the diagonal line 256 font units wide. I include this note so that readers know of the situation.

The value of p needs to be calculated.

There follows some mathematics for the benefit of those interested in how I calculated the value of p. This section can be omitted if desired, in which case, please move forward to the line that starts with “The answer is”.

Please consider the angle theta to be the angle of the lower line of the new contour with the horizontal.

tan(theta)=(1280 - p) / 1792

The angle theta can be used to express the thickness of the line, which is 256 font units.

256 / p =cos(theta)

p = 256 / cos(theta)

Using that expression for p in the first equation produces a new equation.

The first equation rewritten so as to make p more easily substituted.

1792 tan(theta) = 1280 - p

Substitution of the expression for p.

1792 tan(theta) = 1280 - 256 / cos(theta)

1792 tan(theta) cos(theta) = 1280 cos(theta) - 256

1792 tan(theta) cos(theta) - 1280 cos(theta) + 256 = 0

Use a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to find theta and thus p.

The method that I used was to calculate the value of the following expression for a number of values of theta.

1792 tan(theta) cos(theta) - 1280 cos(theta) + 256

When the value of the expression is zero, then that is the value of theta to use.

In fact, I calculated the value that p would have for each value of theta as part of the spreadsheet calculation. When theta was 28.8 degrees, the value of the expression was -2.369966466 and when the value of theta was 28.9 degrees the value of the expression was 1.447436233, so the value of theta is somewhere between 28.8 degrees and 28.9 degrees.

Noting that the value for p if theta were 28.8 degrees is 292.1351689 font units and the value for p if theta were 28.9 degrees is 292.4161883 font units and knowing that I need a whole number value for p, there was no need to refine the calculation further, the value that I used for p is 292 font units.

p = 256 / cos(theta)

The answer is 292 pixels.

Thus the vertical value for the non-corner point at the left is 988 font units (= 1280 - 292) and the vertical value for the non-corner point at the right is 292 font units (= 0 + 292).

Thus I now have a centre symbol design for the sentences about the contact information in relation to the enquirer.

I have also designed a few more glyphs to represent sentences using the new centre symbol.

William Overington

15 June 2011

William · June 15, 2011, 12:18pm

I have now produced some png files of those glyphs.

In designing the sentences and the symbol glyphs about name and address, I regarded that name is usually on one line and that address is usually on more than one line.

For the sentence about the email address I tried to produce a design similar to an @ sign, noting that it also looks something like the e in email.

I designed the symbols for the sentences about passing a message, the message being in plain text rather than encoded in localizable sentences, by basing the glyph design upon the idea of the message being enclosed within double quotes.

William Overington

15 June 2011

William · June 16, 2011, 8:51am

William:

The other issue is what centre symbol to use for the following sentences regarding providing information about a person.

The person is safe.
The person is injured.
The person is in hospital.
The person is missing.
There is no information about the person here at present.

With sentences providing request information about the person, I am happy to use a circle as the centre symbol.

For example in the following sentence.

The age of the person is as follows.

However, I feel that for providing up to date, after the disaster, information about the person that a different centre symbol should be used, one that would stand out if someone were looking through an unlocalized display of the message.

So, I am trying to devise some bold, original logos for the centre position, logos that display well and can also be straightforwardly drawn with a pen.

I thought of a few designs for the centre logo and made one in a font. However, none seemed to be suitable.

So I decided to design a new symbol for the leftmost area and use a circle for the centre area symbol.

Here is the result.

Designs for symbols for sentences for providing up to date, after the disaster, information about the person could each follow the same design for the left and centre areas of the glyph and be different each from the others for the rightmost area of the glyph.

Research needs to be done to decide upon an appropriate collection of sentences.

Once a list of sentences has been decided upon, symbol glyphs can be designed and the glyphs mapped into the Unicode Private Use Areas and a font made publicly available.

Also, once a complete list of sentences for meaningful communication has been decided upon then hopefully the sentences can be translated into many languages by expert linguists and those translations made publicly available.

The system would then be usable, although with some effort as the messages would need to be sent by email and copied and pasted into WordPad, displayed using the font and manually decoded using a list of symbols and the translations.

However, using the lists it will hopefully be possible for automated localization to take place using specially written software modules, hopefully integrated into email programs with an option to turn automated localization on or off so that there would be no confusion with other uses of the Private Use Areas that are unconnected with this system.

If this system is found to be useful then maybe the localizable sentences could eventually be encoded into regular Unicode, thus each localizable sentence in the collection would have a unique Unicode codepoint. I have suggested that Unicode plane 7 could be a suitable place to encode localizable sentences.

William Overington

16 June 2011

William · July 27, 2011, 8:45am

I have been trying to design glyphs for the following two sentences.

Where is a pharmacy please?

Where can I buy a meal with no gluten-containing ingredients in it please?

Although both sentences start with the word Where and both ask a question, they differ in that the second of the two sentences is needing to avoid something.

So, I have decided to use two different designs for the leftmost areas of the glyphs for the two sentences.

For the Where is a pharmacy please? sentence, the leftmost area design is like a capital D, from the Italian word Dove, meaning where.

For the Where can I buy a meal with no gluten-containing ingredients in it please? sentence, the leftmost area design is like a letter s, from the Italian word senza, meaning without.

My thinking is that these two designs can be prototypes for two sets of localizable sentences encoded as Unicode characters, the first set about finding something and the second set about finding something without something else.

William Overington

27 July 2011

William · August 8, 2011, 12:42pm

Supplementary note of 10 August 2011

The designs of three of the glyphs were altered on 10 August 2011 and that is explained in a post of 10 August 2011 in this thread.

The three altered glyph designs are those for the following three sentences.

U+E283 The enquirer is the husband of the first person that was named.

U+E28B The enquirer is the brother of the first person that was named.

U+E2AB The enquirer is the sister of the first person that was named.

The text and attachment of the original post continue unaltered after this supplementary note, so as to conserve the historical record.

End of supplementary note of 10 August 2011.

Here is the Localizable Sentences 019 font.
LOCSE019.TTF (62.7 KB)
This font adds twenty mapped glyphs.

U+E180 Where is a pharmacy please?

U+E1A0 Where can I buy a meal with no gluten-containing ingredients in it please?

U+E200 Is there any information about the following person please?
U+E201 Also, is there any information about the following person please?

U+E220 The person is male.
U+E221 The person is female.

U+E242 The person is the father of the first person that was named.

U+E262 The person is the mother of the first person that was named.

U+E282 The enquirer is the father of the first person that was named.
U+E283 The enquirer is the husband of the first person that was named.
U+E284 The enquirer is the son of the first person that was named.

U+E28B The enquirer is the brother of the first person that was named.

U+E2AB The enquirer is the sister of the first person that was named.

U+E2C0 The name of the enquirer is as follows.

U+E2C2 The postal address of the enquirer is as follows.
U+E2C3 The postal address of the enquirer is now completed.

U+E2C8 The email address of the enquirer is as follows.

U+E2CC Please convey the following message to the person.
U+E2CD The message to the person is now completed.

U+E2E0 The person is safe.

The fonts LOCSE011.TTF through to LOCSE018.TTF have not been published as they are fonts used to design glyphs and the glyphs were placed with more or less arbitrary code points so as to be able to produce graphic files, which files were published.

The file LOCSSE010.TTF was opened in FontCreator 5.6.
A copy was then saved as LOCSE019.TTF with Localizable Sentences 019 as the font name.

The glyphs developed in the fonts LOCSE011.TTF through to LOCSE018.TTF were copied into LOCSE019.TTF with carefully chosen codepoints so as to produce a font that can be used for research yet is ready for use in real situations and is capable of expansion in the light of experience and need for other sentences.

In choosing the codepoints for particular glyphs, I produced the following list. The glyphs for most of the localizable sentences have not yet been produced yet and some of them have not yet been designed. Please note that U+E250 through to U+E25F are available for encoding other relationships.

U+E240 The person is the great grandfather of the first person that was named.
U+E241The person is the grandfather of the first person that was named.
U+E242 The person is the father of the first person that was named.
U+E243 The person is the husband of the first person that was named.
U+E244 The person is the son of the first person that was named.
U+E245 The person is the grandson of the first person that was named.
U+E246 The person is the great grandson of the first person that was named.

U+E247 The person is the cousin of the first person that was named. MALE

U+E248 The person is the great great uncle of the first person that was named.
U+E249 The person is the great uncle of the first person that was named.
U+E24A The person is the uncle of the first person that was named.
U+E24B The person is the brother of the first person that was named.
U+E24C The person is the nephew of the first person that was named.
U+E24D The person is the great nephew of the first person that was named.
U+E24E The person is the great great nephew of the first person that was named.

U+E24F The person is the friend of the first person that was named. MALE

U+E260 The person is the great grandmother of the first person that was named.
U+E261 The person is the grandmother of the first person that was named.
U+E262 The person is the mother of the first person that was named.
U+E263 The person is the wife of the first person that was named.
U+E264 The person is the daughter of the first person that was named.
U+E265 The person is the granddaughter of the first person that was named.
U+E266 The person is the great granddaughter of the first person that was named.

U+E267 The person is the cousin of the first person that was named. FEMALE

U+E268 The person is the great great aunt of the first person that was named.
U+E269 The person is the great aunt of the first person that was named.
U+E26A The person is the aunt of the first person that was named.
U+E26B The person is the sister of the first person that was named.
U+E26C The person is the niece of the first person that was named.
U+E26D The person is the great niece of the first person that was named.
U+E26E The person is the great great niece of the first person that was named.

U+E26F The person is the friend of the first person that was named. FEMALE

More sentences need to be defined so that a system that could be used in practice can be produced. However, the set of codepoint allocations and glyphs produced so far do allow for simulations of use in a small range of scenarios to be carried out.

William Overington

8 August 2011

William · August 10, 2011, 6:45am

I have realized that if the new glyphs in LOCSE019.TTF were written by hand in a situation, then there could be problems, for some pairs of glyphs, of deciding which glyph is intended.

For example, there could be confusion between handwritten versions of the LOCSE019.TTF glyphs for the following characters.

U+E283 The enquirer is the husband of the first person that was named.

U+E284 The enquirer is the son of the first person that was named.

Accordingly I have decided to change the glyphs for three of the glyphs for which designs have thus far been published. Those glyphs are as follows.

U+E283 The enquirer is the husband of the first person that was named.

U+E28B The enquirer is the brother of the first person that was named.

U+E2AB The enquirer is the sister of the first person that was named.

This also affects the design of some other glyphs that have not yet been published, as those glyphs have similar designs.

The change is that the L shape at the right of each glyph is changed so that the vertical is extended downward and the horizontal thus joins the vertical at a junction rather than a corner.

I altered the three glyphs in the following manner.

Open LOCSSE019.TTF in FontCreator 5.6.
Save as LOCSE020.TTF with Localizable Sentences 020 as the font name.

In the glyph for U+E283, I noted that the x coordinates of the two points at the corner of the L shape were at 4096 and 4352 font units respectively.

I then drew a new contour with the following points.

4096, 896
4352, 896
4352, 0
4096, 0

I then copied the new contour onto the clipboard, so that I could use it later for the other two glyphs.

I then merged the new contour into the glyph, by selecting two contours and then using Edit Join Contours Union.

I then updated the two other glyphs.

Here are the designs, showing for comparison both the original and the new versions.

Here is the font.
LOCSE020.TTF (62.7 KB)
William Overington

10 August 2011

William · August 11, 2011, 8:03am

The following pdf lists the eighty-five mapped symbol glyphs of the Localizable Sentences 020 font and localizations into English en-gb-oed text.
locse020.pdf (19.4 KB)
William Overington

11 August 2011

William · August 17, 2011, 12:02pm

The Localizable Sentences 021 font adds fifty-seven glyphs. These new glyphs, together with seven of the glyphs already in the Localizable Sentences 020 font, provide glyphs for the following sixty-four sentences. Please note the gaps in the mappings so as to provide space for another thirty-two relationship identifying localizable sentences for each of relationship to a person and relationship to an enquirer.

I have found the designing of the glyphs interesting. I have sought to provide as logical a structure as possible whilst trying to keep the glyphs clear and such that they would hopefully be unambiguous if written with a pen.