design problem: fonts and spacing

[Charles Hartman]

On Jun 30, 2005, at 9:34 AM, Mark Greenberg wrote:

> Charles,
>     I'd be tempted to show the stressed syllables in bold or blue  
> or some other visually different format within the line.  That way  
> the text and the scansion line will never be out of sync.  This  
> solution won't account for consecutive syllables of similar stress  
> though.

I'm afraid that won't work -- first, because of the problem you note,  
and second, because this tutorial is meant to teach the traditional  
method(s) of scansion, and this system of notation is very firmly  
established in the tradition.

>     You might want to explore two other possible ways to solve the  
> problem: Unicode probably has a diacritic mark for the traditional  
> stressed and unstressed symbols, and there is a way to get the  
> pixel coordinates of a particular character, though I don't recall  
> the function's name.  Perhaps someone on the list can tell what the  
> function is.  Then you could line up the text and scan lines.  (I  
> used the latter for math equations in which one number must line up  
> vertically with another.  As I recall, it worked well.)

I guess I don't quite see how that would work in detail, but I can  
look for it. It sounds, though, like an _awful_ lot of very finicky  
work, on every individual example, of which there are a pretty large  
number.

Is there some HTML-tag or RTF-tag approach to this problem?

I gather that text in any field always _has_ both an HTML and a  
Unicode representation, because you can always "get HTMLText" or "get  
RTFText" on these properties. Are those stored with the text itself?  
How _is_ text (in a field) stored internally by Rev? Knowing that  
might help me figure out the most efficient way to specify spacing in  
some parts of my text.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Charles Hartman

>
>         Mark Greenberg
>
> On Thursday, June 30, 2005, at 05:17 AM, Charles Hartman wrote:
>
>
>> I'm reviving an old Hypercard tutorial on English Metrics -- how to
>> scan metrical verse in English. It contains lots of scansions, which
>> have this general form:
>>
>>      x      /   |  /       /   |  x  (/) |  x    / |  x (/)
>>      A sight so touching in its majesty
>>
>> As you can see, the spacing of the two lines _in relation to each
>> other_ is critical.
>>
>> I'm finding that when I close and reopen my stack, the spacing of the
>> upper (scansion) line is sometimes off -- too condensed or too spaced
>> out. I set the Font for the whole stack file to Palatino. I'm also
>> not sure if that's a good idea, because I haven't yet been able to
>> ttest whether it will work on Windows. I'm developing on OS X.
>>
>> One solution is to put all the scansion-line-pairs into Courier --
>> monospaced, universally available, and really ugly. Another is to do
>> all the scansions as graphic images, but there are hundreds of them.
>>
>> Is there a better solution?
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> use-revolution mailing list
> use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your  
> subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
>

Charles Hartman
Professor of English, Poet in Residence
Connecticut College
charles.hartman at conncoll.edu
*the Scandroid* is at cherry.conncoll.edu/cohar/Programs