Tibetan Line breaking options
Posted: Sun Jul 15, 2007 5:27 am
I've recently been coming across quite a number of very carefully calligraphed Tibetan (chos skad) manuscripts in Bhutan where tsheg is never used at the end of lines (and of course never used to pad lines to achieve justification). I guess the line break itself was considered enough to delimit the end of a "syllable" - and it may be that a tsheg at the end of a line was considered inauspicious by the calligraphers concerned.
These are all manuscripts clearly written by "professionals" - and include an entire bka' 'gyur and two rnyig ma rgyud 'bum manuscripts as well as individual large sutras written in gold ink - so they are fairly significant. Dropping the tsheg at the end of lines in these texts was certainly deliberate - and I think it goes to show that there was not a single set of rules for formatting Tibetan - but that different conventions were followed by different traditions of calligraphy
Anyway, if it is not too difficult to implement, an option to hide the tsheg at the end of lines might be another nice feature to add to PechaMaker since this would enable users to reproduce the formatting conventions followed in these particular manuscript examples.
(Of course this is nothing urgent - just a suggestion for an enhancement.)
- Chris
These are all manuscripts clearly written by "professionals" - and include an entire bka' 'gyur and two rnyig ma rgyud 'bum manuscripts as well as individual large sutras written in gold ink - so they are fairly significant. Dropping the tsheg at the end of lines in these texts was certainly deliberate - and I think it goes to show that there was not a single set of rules for formatting Tibetan - but that different conventions were followed by different traditions of calligraphy
Anyway, if it is not too difficult to implement, an option to hide the tsheg at the end of lines might be another nice feature to add to PechaMaker since this would enable users to reproduce the formatting conventions followed in these particular manuscript examples.
(Of course this is nothing urgent - just a suggestion for an enhancement.)
- Chris