I've noticed that a fair number of people come here through a search
for queries such as "text to image converter". While I'm flattered,
I should probably point out that I wrote this largely for myself
to work in the context of Mark Rosenfelder's constructed languages,
and
it's not terribly general. For example, the font selection is rather
small and fixed-size.
Still, if you don't mind using a bitmapped 8x16 font, you should
still be
able to get good results by setting the font to "Latin 1" and the
input language to "raw", for example by using
this
link. Then enter your text into the box and submit.
The script will reformat your paragraphs (separated by a blank line)
to an 80 character line length; if you do not want this, then you
can check the "raw" box. In that case, you have to insert line
breaks by hand.
If you find the service useful, or if you have any comments or
feedback, I'd appreciate it if you drop me a line at
phil...@pobox.com.
The following fonts are available:
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- Maraille
-
a Latin transcription of Verdurian and other Almean languages such
as Cadhinor. This font follows the encoding of the "Maraille" TrueType
font that Mark made. It includes single glyphs for sounds such as
dh, which are often rendered with two letters in
iso-8859-1-based HTML.
- Verdurian
-
a Verdurian font based on the "Verdurian" TrueType font that Mark
made. This font has the same character set and encoding as the
"Maraille" font, but uses a Verdurian font. For example, the letter
represented in Latin transcription by "C" looks like an "X" in this
font, since that is how it is written in Verdurian.
- Eleisa
-
a font that is based on the "Eleisa Normal" TrueType font that Mark
made. This font can be used for displaying Cuêzi text. The Cuêzi
writing system was used as the base for the Cadhinor writing system,
which in turn was expanded slightly when it was used for Verdurian.
The upper-case letters in this font represent an older form of the
writing system (more pictographic, and lacking a separate letter
forms for voiced consonants or diacritics for long or low vowels).
- Ebisedian
-
A font designed for H. S. Teoh's conlang Ebisedian;
designed to be used along with the "Ebisedian" mode.
- Latin 1
-
This is just a font with Latin-1 (iso-8859-1) encoding.
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- Verdurian
-
This is the most generic language setting and will often give
decent results for other languages, including Kebreni.
- Ismaîn
-
This language setting is nearly the same as Verdurian, except
for the treatment of î (i-circumflex).
- Cadhinor
-
Use this language setting when writing Cadhinor. The main difference
between the settings "Cadhinor" and "Verdurian" is the treatment
of the letter H.
- Old Cadhinor
-
This setting automatically capitalises all input, reflecting the
fact that Cadhinor historically used a monocase alphabet. However,
many later texts were written with mixed capitalisation, following
the Verdurian model. If you want to write "classical" Cadhinor and
don't want to capitalise every word by hand, you can select this
setting.
- Cuêzi
-
This setting is used for Cuêzi. Among other things, it reflects the
fact that the Cuêzi font "Eleisa" has a different encoding than
"Maraille" or "Verdurian", so it translates letters to different
code points in some cases. It also allows you to type long vowels
by adding a colon behind the vowel. This input setting will
automatically lower-case all letters of your input, which means that
you will get more modern letterforms when using the "Eleisa" font.
- Old Cuêzi
-
This setting is similar to the one above, except that input is
transformed to upper case, which means that you will get older, more
pictographic letterforms when using the "Eleisa" font.
- Ebisedian
-
Converts the common Ebisedian ASCII transliteration into input
suitable for use with the "Ebisedian" font. For example, a' turns
into an a with acute, ee into an e with macron, and `00~' into
an o-slash with teardrop accent, macron, acute accent, and tilde
beneath. Either "i" or "1" can be used to produce iota (which was
dotless-i in former versions of Ebisedian transliteration).
- raw
-
No transformation at all is done on input. This means that characters
you input will result in whatever glyph is at that position in the
font you choose. If you know the encoding of a font, you can use this
to access glyphs that you may not know the transliteration of.
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Here is a short table comparing the most important differences between
the languages Verdurian, Ismaîn, Cadhinor, and Old Cadhinor.
It's only available as a PNG image.
![[Verdurian - Ismaîn - Cadhinor - Old Cadhinor table image]](vd-encoding.png)
As you can see from the table, it is possible to generate any of the
"variant" characters in any language; the difference is only in which
input characters are required. For example, i-breve is very common in
Verdurian. However, there is no i-breve character in Latin-1, so
i-circumflex was used instead. In order to reach the i-circumflex
character in Verdurian (used, for example, in foreign words), the
two-character sequence "i^" (i, circumflex) has to be typed. However,
in Ismaîn, i-circumflex is common and i-breve is not, so the mapping
was switched so that the more common character can be accessed in an
easier manner.
Similarly with Verdurian and Cadhinor: "h" means something different
in those two languages, so a different letter results. However, what
Verdurian calls "h" can be accessed in Cadhinor by typing "kh" (since
the Cadhinor letter "kh" was later pronounced "h", before it was
dropped completely in standard Verdurian pronunciation), and what
Cadhinor calls "h" can be accessed in Verdurian by typing "h'" (h,
apostrophe), since that letter is also used in Kebreni for what is
transliterated h-with-acute. (An artefact of the work-around is that
the Maraille font will display that letter as h-acute, which is not
standard Cadhinor transliteration. Hence, one should use the Cadhinor
input language when typing in Cadhinor words.)
And here is a table comparing Cuêzi and Old Cuêzi input, again, as
a PNG image.
![[Cuêzi - Old Cuêzi table image]](cz-encoding.png)
As you can see, upper and lower case is not distinguished, and old
Cuêzi strips vowel and consonant distinctions (normal/low/long for
vowels; voiced/unvoiced for consonants).
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HTML entities are supported in input. So if it's difficult for you to
type, for example, á or ö, you can also type á or
ö and the results will be the same. Exception: the "raw"
input language does not do HTML entity decoding.
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Because of the large size of the table, and the number of images,
this has been moved to a separate page.
Comments, suggestions, or feedback to phil...@pobox.com.
Languages of Almea - shavian.org main page
