ศาลาชุมนุม

[Glenn Slayden]

The ideal solution would be for users to specify their own character to font mapping. Even then, I can see problems - how about Thai-based phonetic systems for English that use a combining asterisk below? I can display that in Code2000, but I'm afraid dislike its rendition of Thai. Normally one should let a base character determine the font, but sometimes the combining marks must take precedence, as certainly for hyphens, spaces and hard spaces.

We haven't even considered people who might want to post in Devanagari, Lao or Tua Mueang (the latter's just around the corner), though I agree that using the latter is asking for rendering trouble.

The new site stores in Unicode, as opposed to this old message board, which stores all messages in an 8-bit encoding (I naturally chose TIS-620). So this alone will go a long way.

An interesting solution to the IPA problem is what the forums for my classes at UW use: their message board system is set up with a LaTeX renderer so you can deposit snippets of linguistic LaTeX into your postings, including IPA. How would people feel about that?

Glenn

[Glenn Slayden]

So, to sum up, the proposed actions are
...

I'm actually inclined towards solutions that require the poster to specify exactly what they want, and then have the server dynamically render a PNG for the more obscure glyphs. This provides the least hassle for inexperienced users, who will see the proper thing no matter what, and the obtaining and installing of fonts is standardized at the server. A downside is the inability to copy/paste the results.

The rendering feature could be defeasible in the site control panel, if you wanted the text to be sent to your browser as unicode instead.

Glenn

[David and Bui]

So, to sum up, the proposed actions are
...

I'm actually inclined towards solutions that require the poster to specify exactly what they want, and then have the server dynamically render a PNG for the more obscure glyphs. This provides the least hassle for inexperienced users, who will see the proper thing no matter what, and the obtaining and installing of fonts is standardized at the server. A downside is the inability to copy/paste the results.

The rendering feature could be defeasible in the site control panel, if you wanted the text to be sent to your browser as unicode instead.

Glenn Glenn, does this mean that Thai and English would continue to be in Unicode?

[Glenn Slayden]

Glenn, does this mean that Thai and English would continue to be in Unicode?

Yes, any solution would only apply to IPA and languages with poor font coverage, although in theory, images could be generated for Thai too, perhaps to support mobile devices with no Thai fonts. This is not a new idea, Dan Forys has had optional image rendering at Fozza.com for a long time.

Glenn

[Tommo]

Looks good.

will it have 'quick reply'?

I really hope the challenge/spam test is not needed now, it's so irritating. If it has to stay can you not set it to only be required for users with less than say 25 posts?

What do you mean by "quick reply"

As for the 25-post thing, that's a good suggestion. I've made a note of it. Meanwhile, I believe that the challenge test will be easier to read in the new system.

Glenn Oh good, I understand the need to keep spam bots at bay but there are little measures to prevent them so that the real posters don't suffer, from what i've seen/used:

-Challenge test for users with less than 25 posts and/or users registered for less than 1 month
-Limit posting to 2 new topics a day in the first week
-Disallow URLS/images/500+ character posts/signatures/avators to be added to posts from users with less than 25 posts or users registered for less than 1 month etc etc
-Admin verified first 5 posts/threads (ok for smaller forums such as this)


Quick reply: on a lot of forums, instead of clicking the reply button and being directed to a new page a "quick reply" is a text box at the bottom of the list of posts where you can just type a message and hit 'submit', very useful if you want to type a little reply that does not involve different fonts or adding pictures.

Perhaps just food for thought.