I’m a Unicode geek, but I feel like I don’t really know enough about what goes on in operating systems after the encoding and decoding issues are worked out. That is, when and where does all of that glyph selection and font shaping and other black magic actually happen? How much of it is dependent on the operating system? Applications? Fonts?
Head a splodes.
But whatever, live and learn. I did run across a very nicely done introduction to what appears to be the cutting edge in computer typography, OpenType:
Adam Twardoch’s PDF slides on OpenType: Typographic perfection with OpenType?
It gives a good idea of the sort of subtleties that OpenType can handle. And it’s very pretty. Font nerds, rejoice…
Random translation observation:
I was translating some Brazilian Portuguese into English, and the source article was about an earthquake near São Paulo. (See? Brazil does have natural disasters!)
A particular phrase got me thinking: a zona leste de São Paulo meaning something like “the Eastern Zone of São Paulo.” That’s a pretty tricky thing to translate―you don’t really talk about the “Eastern Zone” of a city in English.
In the States, you might talk about the “Upper East Side” of New York, or the “South Side” of Chicago, or “Northwest” (sometimes just “NW”) in DC. My Brazilo-Londonian homey Carlos tells me that zones in London have numbers, so you talk about “Zone 5,” etc.
And then there are those arrondissements in Paris, which are numbered like an escargot.
So does “The East Side of São Paulo” work as a translation for “a zona leste de São Paulo”? Sounds okay to me, actually.
I’d be curious to know about the ways that other cities are subdivided.
No comments yet.
Technorati tags: Language and the Web, opentype