Blog: #thai

Pleased to announce a new project: parallel language editions of the Book of Mormon, available as free PDF downloads. Here’s what they look like:

We’re starting out with the following editions, but I have more in the works. (Requests welcome!)

• Dutch–English
• French–English
• German–Dutch
• German–English
• Italian–English
• Lao–English
• Lao–Thai
• Portuguese–English
• Portuguese–Spanish
• Spanish–English
• Spanish–Italian
• Thai–English

Implementation/design notes

• Chrome has a weird Skia bug where text in exported PDFs isn’t searchable/copyable, which was a dealbreaker since these editions are meant to be digital-only.
• Firefox does handle searching and copying just fine, but (sadly) it isn’t able to break the two-columned text correctly across page breaks. This means every part of a verse has to be on the same page (as opposed to half at the bottom of one and half at the top of the next), with the result that some pages have more whitespace at the bottom than is economical.
• Firefox also doesn’t respect break-after: avoid, so I had to add page breaks before each chapter heading (which adds even more extra whitespace) (which can be a valid design decision, to be clear, but my original intent was to stream the chapters with no breaks so that the page count wouldn’t balloon). There’s a potential workaround that I’m looking into in the meantime.
• There are no page numbers, because Firefox and Chrome don’t yet support the CSS paged media rules for that, and Paged.js choked and died on these files.
• Browsers still aren’t great at paragraph layout, so there are going to be occasional widows and orphans.
• I originally started on these several years ago using LaTeX, but I ran into issues getting the page layout to work the way I wanted it to. Layout-wise, things were so, so much easier with HTML and CSS.
• If/when some of these browser issues get fixed (or I find workarounds), I’ll post updated files.

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On why there are so many Thai restaurants in the U.S.

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I’ve posted the PlotDevice source files to GitHub for the following charts:

• Latin conjugations
• Latin pronouns
• Thai consonants

I’ve also added the alternate vocative version of the declensions chart to the Latin declensions repo.

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I’ve wanted to put the Thai alphabet up on our wall so my kids can start learning it, and I’ve learned a lot about design since I made the Thai script card (which was really just a touchup on an existing card design I received in the MTC), so I made a new Thai consonants chart:

This one adds the consonant class (low/medium/high) and colors the initial consonant transliteration so it’s clearer.

I made it in PlotDevice, using a setup very similar to the Latin conjugation charts — YAML data file with a script that turns it into a PDF.

I’m planning to make two companion charts later — one for vowels and one for the miscellaneous marks, numerals, tones, etc.

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