India, Ink. Comments

Comment on Note to Self: Transcribing Podcasts by Transkript für Logbuch Netzpolitik #232

Transkript für Logbuch Netzpolitik #232 — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 21:10:31 +0000

[…] Note to Self: Transcribing Podcasts […]

Comment on Communication is key: Giving the hard sell on “soft skills” by Elisabeth

Elisabeth — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 07:39:13 +0000

Excellent post! I kept thinking that soft skills could be re-named into something like "personality UX", because it doesn't help if you are super clever and brilliant, if working with you makes everyone want to run away and hide. (Fancy/new names for obvious stuff always helps make it trendy.)

Comment on Manually editing ruby on Chinese characters in InDesign by J.D.

J.D. — Fri, 12 Aug 2016 18:41:10 +0000

FYI – It’s easy to type in Chinese characters using a U.S. keyboard. Your screenshots show a Mac operating system. So, for you, it would involve going to [Apple] > [System Preferences] > [Keyboard] > [Input Sources], then press “+” and then go to either Chinese Traditional or Chinese Simplified, and select either Pinyin Traditional or Pinyin Simplified to add it to your input sources. Then check the box “Show Input menu in menu bar.” You will see a flag icon appear in the top bar. By default, it will probably be a U.S. flag (if you’re in the U.S., for example). To enable writing in Pinyin, you’d click the flag, select Pinyin (either simplified or traditional) from the dropdown menu and then type. What will happen is that you will type in the Pinyin (what you refer to as the pronunciation key), and then a list of characters will show up. You can either click or press the number of the character on the list, and then it will enter. Click on the flag again and put it back to the U.S. (or your country’s flag) in order to go back to normal typing.

I just self-printed a book that featured Chinese characters in it and this made the process a lot easier.

Also important: Sometimes Chinese characters have more than one pronunciation! Take a look at this dictionary entry for a Chinese character, and pay special attention to the direction of the accent marks on the entries (they’re not all the same): https://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrst=1&wdqb=? (Note that the last two slightly different characters are a variant form of the character.) This is something which makes romanization difficult — you really need to know what the meaning of the character is in the specific context, in order to know what the character’s romanization will be.

Comment on Manually editing ruby on Chinese characters in InDesign by Anne-Marie Concepcion

Anne-Marie Concepcion — Fri, 01 May 2015 14:30:24 +0000

I just stumbled on this post. A good friend of mine, Diane Burns, owns a company that specializes in CJK and other non-Latin language publishing out of InDesign. I'll send her the URL to this to see if she has any insight. (She also has a title on lynda.com all about multi-lingual publishing from InDesign.)

Comment on PDFs in EPUBs: Test results by mokane

mokane — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 16:24:50 +0000

You could try running the pdf through this open source program if it’s letter size or A4 (http://willus.com/k2pdfopt/).

Did you try re-generating the pdf in a more friendly ebook size? Would a fixed layout e-pub solve the problem, assuming you could regenerate the pdf to the same dimensions of the fixed layout epub, i.e. not letter size or a4?

Comment on Manually editing ruby on Chinese characters in InDesign by mokane

mokane — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 16:11:13 +0000

If you are familiar with LaTex, typesetting a Chinese-character book requires no additional skills. The roman font which accompanies the Chinese character font looks very thin. I don't know what this font is called, but it's ubiquitous--it seems to accompany different Chinese fonts.

Comment on Degristling the sausage: BBEdit 11 Edition by India

India — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 03:53:30 +0000

In reply to Wu.

That Sigil tool is a nice idea, but unreliable: sometimes it deletes styles that definitely are in use.

Comment on Degristling the sausage: BBEdit 11 Edition by Trimming the CSS fat ← The Publishing Project

Trimming the CSS fat ← The Publishing Project — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 03:43:50 +0000

[…] reading India Amos Degristling the sausage: BBEdit 11 Edition I thought I’d share my tricks for making CSS files as small as possible. While I learned […]

Comment on Degristling the sausage: BBEdit 11 Edition by Wu

Wu — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 21:16:09 +0000

Or, open the EPUB in Sigil, and click Tools, and Delete Unused Stylesheet Classes.

Comment on “you will need to pick an attractive font” by Expert Subjects

Expert Subjects — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 09:45:59 +0000

I second you Cathi, but then there are designers that still chose to do it; I've seen plenty on Fiverr.