from:"Karl Ove Hufthammer"

Re: [NTG-context] [dev-context] Improved support for Norwegian in ConTeXt

2007-02-10 Thread Karl Ove Hufthammer

Sundag 04 februar 2007 18:16 skreiv Mojca Miklavec:

>I would suggest you to post some of the questions to the ntg-mailing
>list, where more Norwegian users can comment on it.

OK. I'm now crossposting this e-mail to both the dev and the ntg mailing list. 
See my answers to some of your questions below.

>On 2/4/07, Karl Ove Hufthammer wrote:
>> I'm writing this to suggest improvements in ConTeXt's support for the
>> Norwegian languages. ConTeXt already has rudimentary support for
>> Norwegian, but with some problems.
>>
>>
>> Language codes
>> --
>>
>> The main problem is that ConTeXt use the language code 'no' for Norwegian.
>> There actually *is* no written language called 'Norwegian'; Norway has two
>> official written languages, Norwegian Bokmål (ISO 639 language code 'nb')
>> and Norwegian Nynorsk (ISO 639 language code 'nn'). The current
>> definitions for 'no' in ConTeXt is for Norwegian Bokmål. (There is a ISO
>> 639 language code 'no' for Norwegian, but this should usually be used for
>> spoken Norwegian, or perhaps for transcriptions of spoken language.)
>>
>> The language code 'no' should be removed, and be replaced by the two
>> language codes 'nb' and 'nn'.
>
>Although I don't know the exact situation, a few remarks:
>
>- You should probably also provide the correct definitions for calling
>the language (so that one can say \mainlanguage[norwegian], but
>perhaps with what you consider to be the proper language tags). It's
>currently
>
>\installlanguage [norwegian]   [\s!no]
>\installlanguage [norsk]   [\s!no] % bonus switch
>
>You need to fix the two and perhaps add
>\installlanguage [???]   [\s!nb]
>\installlanguage [???]   [\s!nk]

OK. We will need:

\installlanguage [bokmal]   [\s!nb]
\installlanguage [nynorsk]   [\s!nn]

If it is possible to use non-ASCII characters safely, the following would also 
be nice:

\installlanguage [bokmål]   [\s!nb]

>- If you remove [no], older documents might break. I don't know much
>about the situation and the number of users, but can you say which of
>the two language variants [no] should default to? Since the current
>definitions probably point to "nb" (from the first blick) - would it
>make sense to use "nb" when one says \mainlanguage[no]?

Yes.

>Perhaps one can issue a warning when the language "no" is selected
>(statig something like "language 'no' is deprecated, please use 'nb'
>for Bokmål or nn for Nynorsk instead")

Yes, that would be the preferred solution. As Hans F. Nordhaug mentioned, 
the 'no' code should be considered deprecated in this context (no pun 
intended).

To sum up, we need the following language codes: nb and nn.
And we need the following mappings:

bokmal --> nb
bokmål --> nb (if possible)
nynorsk --> nn
norsk --> nb (with warning)
norwegian --> nb (with warning)

>Removing it probably doesn't affect the rest, so if other Norwegian
>users agree to remove it completely, it can still be done, but I would
>suggest you to ask the author of the original translations and the
>rest of users on the ntg-context mailing list first. Otherwise it can
>still default to one of the two varians (or to a new one if you
>provide also the third alternative for the "spoken language").
>
>> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language for a (not too good)
>> article on the Norwegian languages.
>>
>> For the record, the language names used in LaTeX/Babel is
>> (unfortunately) 'Norwegian' and 'norsk' for Norwegian Bokmål, and
>> 'nynorsk' for Norwegian Nynorsk, instead of 'bokmal'/'bokmål' and
>> 'nynorsk'. Norwegian Bokmål support was added first, and used up the
>> 'Norwegian' name.
>>
>>
>> Hyphenation
>> ---
>>
>> The two written language are quite similar, and the current hyphenation
>> dictionary (nohyphbx) was made to support both. But there are (at least)
>> two words which are put in the hyphenation exceptions for this dictionary
>> because they would have different hyphenation (because of different
>> meaning) in Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål. These are:
>>
>> attende -- nb: at-ten-de ('eighteenth'),   nn: att-en-de ('back')
>> betre   -- nb: be-tre ('enter'/'set foot on'), nn: bet-re ('better')
>>
>> Would it be possible to have two different hyphenation dictionaries for
>> 'nb' and 'nn&#

Re: [NTG-context] Charts, Graphs, Tufte, and ConTeXt

2006-07-27 Thread Karl Ove Hufthammer

Nicolas Grilly skreiv:

> Karl Ove Hufthammer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Yes! R (especially using the new grid and lattice framework) produces
>> excellent charts and graphs, with very sensible default options (much
>> of it based on Cleveland's research).
>
> What is Cleveland's research? Can you provide references on the web?

Cleveland has done much research on graphical perception and the visual
decoding of information from data displays. He was one of the first to do
actual scientific study on this.

Earlier, many people had opinions on various common graphs (e.g., ‘pie
charts are bad – I don’t like them’). Cleveland came along and did actual
scientific *experiments* to show why some type of graphs were worse than
others for presenting data (e.g., ‘humans are very bad at judging angles
and very good at judging position along a common scale; that’s why pie
charts are terrible and dot plots good at presenting (the same) data’),
and he proposed new graphical display *based* on this research.

See for example this very interesting and easy to read article:

Title: Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and
Application to the Development of Graphical Methods
Author(s): William S. Cleveland; Robert McGill
Source: Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 79,
No. 387. (Sep., 1984), pp. 531-554.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0162-1459%28198409%2979%3A387%3C531%3AGPTEAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

Some of Cleveland’s research resulted in novel graphical displays, such as
trellis displays, coplots and dot plots, and much of it resulted in
improvements to common displays. Unfortunately, many of these smaller
improvements and very minor but important details seems to be unknown to
people who design graphing software. Let me mention a few (not too
exciting) examples:

Circles should be used instead of rectangles as plotting symbols, especially
with data overlap, because overlapping rectangles still look like
rectangles, while overlapping circles look nothing like circles. Cleveland
actually recommended a list of plotting symbols (for plotting several
groups in one plot) for use in scatterplots; see:

Title: A Model for Studying Display Methods of Statistical
Graphics
Author(s): William S. Cleveland
Source: Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Vol. 2,
No. 4. (Dec., 1993), pp. 323-343.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1061-8600%28199312%292%3A4%3C323%3AAMFSDM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

Tick marks should point outwards, not inwards (so they don’t camouflage
data).

The data rectangle should always be slightly smaller than the scale-line
rectangle (the box around the data), again to avoid camouflaging the data.

These are just a few (perhaps less interesting) features of graph design
that R does correctly, but many other programs (e.g., gnuplot, at least for
tick marks and data rectangles) don’t (by default).

Much of Cleveland’s research has been summarised in his excellent book

W.S. Cleveland. Elements of Graphing Data. Revised edition. 1994.

Re: [NTG-context] Charts, Graphs, Tufte, and ConTeXt

2006-07-25 Thread Karl Ove Hufthammer

David Wooten wrote:

> Thus I'm curious as to what others use... is R an efficient method to
> produce elegant charts?

Yes! R (especially using the new grid and lattice framework) produces
excellent charts and graphs, with very sensible default options (much
of it based on Cleveland’s research).

There are packages for most common and not-so-common stasticial graphs, but
it is not difficult to create your own from scratch, either, or to modify
existing ones.

For an example of the various graphics possible to create with R, try these
commands (at an R prompt):

library(lattice)   # Load the ‘lattice’ package¹.
grid::grid.prompt(TRUE); par(ask=TRUE) # Pause between each graphic.
example(xyplot)# Many nice lattice graphs.
demo(lattice)  # More lattice graphs.
demo(graphics) # Example of non-lattice graphs.

You may also want to take a look at the R Graph Gallery:
http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/

¹ Which is basically ‘trellis for R’; see
  http://stat.bell-labs.com/project/trellis/.

-- 
Karl Ove Hufthammer
E-mail and Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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Re: [NTG-context] [dev-context] Improved support for Norwegian in ConTeXt

Re: [NTG-context] Charts, Graphs, Tufte, and ConTeXt

Re: [NTG-context] Charts, Graphs, Tufte, and ConTeXt

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