Loughborough Jmap

　This week I discovered that Google Maps have done an amazing job on transliterating English Place and Street names into Japanese Katakana. I am totally impressed. I looked at the Japanese Google Map for Loughborough ラフバラ
　Zoom out to see Town and City names transliterated into Japanese Katakana カタカナ

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Browser Language

By Browser Language I do not mean the Browser User Interface Language. I am referring to the Browser Preferred Language for displaying Pages . I will use the acronym  BL  to mean B rowser preferred L anguage for displaying pages . An internationalised website will have pages in multiple languages. These pages can be displayed according to BL eg If BL is Korean then the website will send it's Korean pages to the browser. With most browsers, the BL can be set in the preferences and can be set independent of the language settings of the OS. Some browsers do inherit their BL from the OS language setting. This ability to change the BL has so much potential that few are aware of. Google are switched on to this potential. Google maps, if embedded correctly, will automatically adapt to BL. You can try it out for yourself. Visit lboro.ac.uk/about/findus.html  and you will see a Google map of Loughborough. Now change the BL in your browser preferences and refresh. You will see...
Read more

Microblog Space (character) Saving

Take the following example two lines of text: Fruit: apples, pears! Veg: cabbage, onions. Cars? Ford; Mini Fruit：apples，pears！Veg：cabbage，onions．Cars？Ford；Mini Line 1 has 60 characters and line 2 has 52 characters. I reduced the number of characters by using full-width punctuation characters. These full-width forms start at Unicode codepoint U+FF01. Using full-width forms I can dispense with the space character. So, for example, instead of colon + space I use full-width colon only. For microblog posts small space savings like this can be very useful. I could, and sometimes do, use OSX Character Viewer to obtain these full-width punctuation characters. When I am microblogging in English I toggle to the Simplified Pinyin Input Method to write the full-width punctuation. This may sound complicated and time consuming but with a little practice it is easy and quick and does not disrupt the flow of writing. There is one exception character. When I type full stop whilst in the OSX Simplif...
Read more

Chinese Tones

Recently, in one of my International Computing lectures, I was demonstrating the use of the Unicode Combining Diacritical Marks. I was using Latin letters as my base character and combining various combinations of diacritcs. As was expected they worked fine. Then an idea occurred to me. I wondered if the diacritics would combine appropriately with Chinese characters. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that with TextEdit on Mac OSX they combined rather well. Later I tried with various Word Processors and the results of combining were either poor or non-existant. The next step was to try it with web pages. Combining did not work at all with the browsers I tried. I then used html5 Ruby Annotation and that works quite well, as below. 北 ̬ 京 ̱ 欢 ̱ 迎 ̗ 你 ̬ The Combining Diacritical Marks I have used for the annotation are:- U+0316 COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT BELOW U+0317 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT BELOW U+032C COMBINING CARON BELOW U+0331 COMBINING MACRON BELOW
Read more