> On Jun 17, 2024, at 7:52 PM, gregebert <[email protected]> wrote: > > I read somewhere that a basic Mandarin character set is over 2000 > symbols....sounds like you might need a few more tubes.
In another lifetime I worked at what is now The Rosetta Stone®. One of my many tasks was to create the printed documentation for the curriculum. Everything that didn't use the Roman alphabet, that is. Chinese and Japanese were loads of fun. Mandarin has two scripts, Traditional and Simplified. Japanese has three, the last being a transliteration to the Roman alphabet. Yeah, they snuck it in. Others included Indonesian, Greek Hindi, Arabic and Hebrew. I don't speak or read any of these languages. I wrote a complex application with HyperCard that took the raw text from the translators and marked it up to be imported into a DTP app with all of the correct font, size, leading etc. applied. If a comma was changed out in the middle of a 100 page book I could have the modified page printed out in exactly seven minutes. I was fluent in Quark Xpress, FrameMaker and PageMaker ME (Middle Eastern version). The latter was the only one that could do right-to-left scripts properly and the biggest PITA. It came with a $540 (in 1997) copy protection dongle. That's in a drawer just to my right. Mandarin? I don't need to speak Mandarin. That's what poor dubbing of "Kung Fu" movies is for. They even had to dub Bruce Lee as he only spoke English and Cantonese. And there you go—one degree of separation from the most amazing athlete I've ever seen. O_O Terry Bowman, KA4HJH "The Mac Doctor" https://www.astarcloseup.com "I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhäuser Gate. "All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain."— Roy Batty, Blade Runner -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/A0C92C42-CA6D-489B-AD2E-946A9279DA32%40gmail.com.
