by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/10/21 06:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/10/21/9009107.aspx
Mail from Simon is as always (a) funny, (b) important, (c) interesting, or (d) all of the above.
Hi latest mail was technically in category "C" and it ended up being a little bit of category "A", albeit unintentionally....
He forwarded me this link, with the subject line "Interesting...".
Now the poster that shows the distance of so many countries from ASCII:
is indeed quite interesting.
When he sends me mail with that subject line, he is usually suggesting it may be blog-worthy, of course....
Though I must admit that I had some fun with the fact that the URL he sent me was actually through a translation site.
So I asked him what was interesting -- the map, or the fact that he didn't think I'd know what to do with the German link? :-)
Obviously he meant the former, of course!
Not to mention the fact that I might have run it through the translator anyway (no matter how much I can puzzle out now in various languages when the topic is one I fully understand, when it comes to a lot of typography stuff I am still merely an egg and thus the backup of a web auto-translation can often give me more information!). :-)
But the blog (FontShop-Poster: Jenseits von ASCII) and the poster are both really interesting because every example of how far we are getting from ASCII as more and more content from other languages becomes prevalent on the web is a good thing to have.
Feel free to check the German yourself and see how much you can suss out in regard to the meaning -- then look at the translation to see how well you did (I'm assuming when I say this that you don't know German -- if you do, then you can compare the two and talk about the translation quality!).
We are pretty freaking far beyond ASCII now. And getting farther all the time....
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A. Skrobov on 22 Oct 2008 5:57 AM:
That's cool, but where's the poster itself?
The requested URL /news/pdf/FontShop_Jenseits_von_ASCII.pdf was not found on this server.
Michael S. Kaplan on 22 Oct 2008 7:05 AM:
It was there when I looked - though if they moved it or took it down you may want to ask in the blog there, since they would know where it went. :-)