Why my job satisfies my geek soul
Tuesday, October 26th, 2004 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanaleh
(Typography and linguistics geek, that is.)
Today I learned that there exists a double acute accent -- unique to Hungarian, and also known as the "long umlaut".
Which is why, in this one chapter in this one book, all the special characters that I thought were marked as funny-looking o-umlauts in the manuscript, I really do have to change to o-double-acute.
I even looked it up when I was setting this chapter in the first place, to make sure it wasn't some obscure diacritic of which I should be aware. But this chapter is about battles between the Hungarians and the Ottomans... and I thought these were Turkish place names, so I looked up Turkish diacritics, and satisfied myself that they could only be umlauts. But they are actually the Hungarian names, and now I know. (And I never was conscious of a particular resemblance between Hungarian and Turkish before. But, Mezökeresztes? Temesvar? Köszeg?)
Thank goodness Bembo includes a double-acute character, which I am kerning together with the regular o. (I could perhaps have Unicoded it, but I'm not sure my version of Quark would stand for it.) This even inclines me to forgive Bembo for its painfully overenthusiastic kerning of capital letters, which I am having to kern out again on practically every page.
Today I learned that there exists a double acute accent -- unique to Hungarian, and also known as the "long umlaut".
Which is why, in this one chapter in this one book, all the special characters that I thought were marked as funny-looking o-umlauts in the manuscript, I really do have to change to o-double-acute.
I even looked it up when I was setting this chapter in the first place, to make sure it wasn't some obscure diacritic of which I should be aware. But this chapter is about battles between the Hungarians and the Ottomans... and I thought these were Turkish place names, so I looked up Turkish diacritics, and satisfied myself that they could only be umlauts. But they are actually the Hungarian names, and now I know. (And I never was conscious of a particular resemblance between Hungarian and Turkish before. But, Mezökeresztes? Temesvar? Köszeg?)
Thank goodness Bembo includes a double-acute character, which I am kerning together with the regular o. (I could perhaps have Unicoded it, but I'm not sure my version of Quark would stand for it.) This even inclines me to forgive Bembo for its painfully overenthusiastic kerning of capital letters, which I am having to kern out again on practically every page.