Help:How to display your conscript on the wiki

There are three or four steps to displaying your conscript into the wiki, and an optional fifth step (Click on the links for more detailed instructions):

1. Create an image of your conscript. Usually you will draw or write it, perhaps into a table prepared in a word processor and then printed out.

2. Get the image into a suitable computer image form if it isn't already. Usually by scanning it and postprocessing it in an image manipulation program.

3. Upload the image to the wiki. By clicking on the link Upload file in the left sidebar of the wiki page.

4. Include the image into the wiki article. This is done using a variant of the ordinary syntax for wiki-internal links.

5. Optionally create a font for your conscript and make it available on the wiki.

1. Create an image of your conscript

If you are keen on being able to produce computer documents using your conscript you may want to create a font for your conscript, however this is a major undertaking in itself, and such documents are not very useful online, since you'd need to either get people to download and install your font, or to create PDF documents.

For someone who unlike me has fully functional hands and some drawing skills it is usually better to write/draw a paper document and scan it in step #2.

Assuming you want a table of your conscript similar to the one I made of the Kijeb syllabary you would:

1.1. Create a table in your word processor, writing in everything that should be in Roman/print and leaving blanks for the actual glyphs.

1.2. Print it out in as large a scale as your printer will allow (you may actually want to make several sub-tables and glue them together -- probably not literally, but afterward in an image editor).

1.3. Fill in the glyphs by hand with a fountain pen or an art/technical marker which gives a true line. You may want to first draw the glyphs with a faint pencil and fill them in with ink when you got them right, in which case the ink should allow you to erase the pencil without smearing the ink. This usually works fine with technical markers.

(When creating images of shorthand writing I actually used a soft, black artists' pencil and scanned it, which was quite satisfactory for that purpose and allowed for correction, although you will need a good plastic eraser to avoid smudge. Alas I can't recommend any brands, since the good erasers sold here are made in Germany, and probably not available or expensive in the US.)

2. Get the image into a suitable computer image form

Scan your finished table. If you haven't got your own there are shops which will do it for you, and put it on a floppy or CD for you, or maybe email it to your computer. I have no idea what it may cost where you are (it is alas unrealistically expensive here, so if you haven't got your own scanner a friend who has one is the best option).

2.1. Make sure the image file is in a good image format for your purposes. If the image contains few colors and biggish white areas, as is likely GIF is the best. PNG is good too, but transparent PNGs may print out as black boxes on Windows.

2.2. Open your image(s) in an image editor (if you haven't got one The Gimp <www.gimp.org> is recommendable) and touch it up: 'gluing' parts together and getting into an appropriate size (usually larger than what should be displayed on the wiki page but not unreasonably large -- rather what would fit on a US Letter or A4, in practice 259 x 190 mm (10.1 x 7.48 inches) if you want to allow a 10 mm margin on each side). There are more arcane things you can do to assure that white areas are really white, and black areas really black, but it takes some care and expertise to assure things don't get pixelly.

5. Optionally create a font for your conscript

5.1. Get a font editing program.

5.2. Make the font available on the wiki.