posted by toneandcolor on January 28, 2009 | 0 comments
I am interested in creating a couple of lessons based on poems from the 唐诗三百首. Am I wrong in thinking that it would be an easy addition to allow for a third format (besides dialogue and article/paragraph form) for lesson text written vertically? Just a thought. Sometimes so much of a poem's structure (echoing of subj/predicate; reduplication of adjectives etc.) seems to emerge when the characters line up in columns.
Looked into this - there doesn't seem to be any consistent way to support vertical text orientation across browsers right now. This means that any solution to this would be a technical hack - at which point just uploading an image to the discussion page would probably accomplish the same end.
toneandcolor on February 1, 2009 | reply
Sounds good. I'll just make an image file to supplement the lesson then. I also was curious about mp3 support: I have native speaking friends that I can record here on my computer, but the sound quality won't be as good as your studio. Is that OK, or would Echo like to make a recording of the poem for me (it's only 30 seconds or so...)?Not sure what the precedent was...
@toneandcolor - I don't think we have any precedent... just give us the text a day or two in advance and we can record anything you need.For everyone else, we've got a page for making lesson requests. Submissions and suggestions are welcome in Chinese or English.
There is a Mac app out there that will format pasted text as columnar text, but it does it manually, so it's probably not what's needed here. I haven't seen any clever, non <pre>-based ways of doing this for the web, though -- a shame, as I prefer columnar text too.