Re: Nota Bene Lingua characters (was BN seriously)

[Robert Hemenway robhem@xxxxxxxx]

Nota Bene Lingua for DOS has the Polish slash-Ls, etc., along with, so far
as I know, all or very nearly all of the characters needed for Eastern
European--or as we're supposed to say today Central and Eastern
European--together with Turkish and the transliteration of Sanskrit and
some African, Native American, and Southeast Asian languages. Plus 35 or so
freestanding accents with which you can roll your own. Plus Cyrillic,
Greek, and Hebrew. The system is proprietary. The sole typeface for the
Roman special characters, as I recall, is Times Roman--a well designed
Times Roman A phonetic alphabet is also available. The phonetic used to be
an add-on that cost a bit extra.

The Lingua system is well engineered and quite remarkable--and it's sui
generis. (So far as I know.) With it, you can quickly bop to a special
keyboard, drop in any diacritic character, or a word or phrase in Greek or
Hebrew or Russian, and then bop right back to your standard English
keyboard..

I assume that Lingua for NBWin will be much the same.

I don't know whether XyWrite files that include Speedo characters can be
converted easily into Nota Bene Lingua. It's been several years since I've
used Lingua.
I sorta doubt it. They're both proprietary systems.

Have no idea whether SmartWords retains the Speedo fonts or no. The Speedo
character list has a great many omissions. Not every character you need for
E. Europe & Turkey is there. Bitstream stopped development of the set
before it was completed. I wound up constructing my own fonts. With a
program like Fontmonger, and with the "superfonts" for Times New Roman,
Courier, and Helvetica that come with OS/2, it's pretty easy to construct
fonts in the Latin 2 (E. Europe) code page--or whatever you want. As I
recall, the superfonts have about anything you'd need. I _think_ that
comparable TTF fonts are distributed with Windows now, but I'm not sure.

This kind of manipulation is impossible with Nota Bene typefaces, so far as
I can see. The possibilities of customization are more limited in NB than
in Xy. But for scholars and writers who are easily seduced into bricolage
and endless tinkering (like the undersigned), this may be a plus.

Perhaps these remarks are of some use . . .

Robert Hemenway

At 11:11 AM 10/23/99 -0400, you wrote:
>another question about speedo fonts and NB or SW.
>
>I sometimes need Eastern European, Turkish, etc. characters. If you use TT
>fonts in XyWin, you can insert the speedo chars using the characters menu
>no matter what font your using, although they don't always match the font
>you're using very closely. The character menu in NB is much less handy, and
>doesn't include any characters not in the first (English) ISO character set.
>
>When I open a XyWin file with these characters in NB, not only do all the
>usual foreign language characters display wrongly, the upper characters for
>the Speedo sets display as boxes; when I switch to expanded view, they
>appear with their code number (e.g. [350]) as they do in expanded view in
>XyWin.
>
>Do the people who see the speedo fonts with a strikethrough on their screen
>see the upper characters as well?
>
>I gather that in the much more expensive "Lingua" version of NB, you can
>"put accents on anything": does that include polish slash-Ls, etc.?
>
>