Category Archives: Asides

Should I stay or should I go?

  • I permanently deactivated my Twitter account in January 2023. Links to the account below aren’t functional anymore.

I was recently wondering again whether I should move my Ayeri stuff to my own top level domain from its current residence at nfshost.com. I haven’t planned anything concrete, I’m just curious for your opinion. There’s a poll embedded in the following tweet.

See the message on Twitter.

The thing is, Ayeri’s been living at its current address since July 2008, and thus, things from this site are linked in quite a few other places. In this regard, I feel somewhat uneasy breaking continuity. On the other hand, people usually come in from a handful of sources only, besides search engines, and I can always put a redirect up here.

Tagāti Book G, Graphite and TeXLive 2014

I updated my operating system to Ubuntu 15.04 ‘Vivid’ the other day and ran into trouble when I tried using my Tahano Hikamu font, Tagāti Book G. The issue was that XeLaTeX would ignore Graphite as the text rendering engine for this font in spite of my explicitly declaring it:

\newfontfamily{\Tagati}[
    Renderer=Graphite,
    ...
]{Tagati Book G}

The result was that none of the diacritics were aligned correctly, since the font is not configured for OpenType to handle them:

Demonstration of the bug in fontspec-xetex.sty 2.4a
a: Rendering as expected; b: Graphite ignored

After some research, it turned out that the bug is with the file fontspec-xetex.sty.[1. On my system, the path to the file is /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/fontspec/fontspec-xetex.sty, use kpsewhere fontspec-xetex.sty to find it, otherwise.] Ubuntu 15.04 still ships with TeXLive 2014, which includes version 2.4a of it as a part of the fontspec package. In this version, there is a typo in the definition for Graphite which apparently makes it inaccessible through the Renderer option. You can read up on it in the bug report on GitHub.

Changing fontspec-xetex.sty according to the bug report and saving it under my home directory’s TeX tree at ~/texmf/tex/latex/fontspec/ to not overwrite the original file solved the issue for me. Another way to solve the issue for the time being is to include a snippet of code in your TeX file’s preamble that basically redefines the respective function.

The issue is already fixed in the latest version of the fontspec package, also in the version that’s available from CTAN, so I hope there will be an update to the fontspec package in the official Ubuntu repositories as well sometime.

Returning to Germany Soon

[gloss]Tadayang nā ya Minkayi panganya-ngas.
time-A 1SG.GEN LOC Canada end-LOC=almost[/gloss]
My time in Canada is almost up.

[gloss]Ang sa-sahāy ya Keynami mangasaha bihanya yo miday.
AT return-1SG.A.T LOC Germany towards week-LOC four approximately.[/gloss]
I will return to Germany in approximately four weeks.

[gloss]Kamayāng mino nay giday yanoyam eng engara kardang edaya pisu-pisu ya Keynami nārya, sa vacyang-mas hati metida enyana palung nay yanoavan veno miday ya Sikatay.
be.equal-1SG.A happy and sad because AT.INAN be.more-3SG.INAN school.T here exhausting LOC Germany although, PT like-1SG.A=kind.of ambiance relaxed everything-GEN else and landscape.T beautiful around LOC Victoria.[/gloss]
I am both happy and sad because although school here is more exhausting than in Germany, I kind of like the relaxed ambience of everything else and the beautiful landscape around Victoria.

[gloss]Bimakanganjas-kay nā matayena
photo-PL.P=some 1SG.GEN summer-GEN[/gloss]
Some of my photos from the summer

Greetings from Canada

Manojas-ikan na Minkayi.

[gloss]Mano-ye-as=ikan na Minkayi.
greeting-PL-P=many GEN Canada[/gloss]
‘Many greetings from Canada.’

Ang yomāy edaya kardangirayyam ya Desember pesan.

[gloss]Ang yoma-ay edaya kardangiray-yam ya Desember pesan.
AT exist-1SG.T here university-DAT LOC December until[/gloss]
‘I’m here for university until December.’

Koronoyyang, ang gamaray gumoas-ikan yam Ayeri, yanoyam deng-ven kihasreng kardang nā.

[gloss]Koron-oy-yang, ang gamar-ay gumo-as=ikan yam Ayeri, yanoyam deng=ven kihas-reng kardang nā.
know-NEG-1SG.A, AT manage-1SG.T work-P=much DAT Ayeri, because full=quite plan-A.INAN school 1SG.GEN[/gloss]
‘I don’t know if I manage to get much work done for Ayeri because my schedule is quite full.’