Software

I'm a computer geek who tries to be an artist, even though I would like that to be the other way around. Being in this disposition basically means that I try to use computers for artistic purposes, but when computers don't do what I need to do, I find myself writing code. Indeed, in Avarthrel's case, I've had to write a whole bunch of code just to scratch these itches. This page will eventually have results of that weird and wonderful labour.

Draft Printout

My most comfortable writing process involves making paper printout of the text drafts and adding corrections manually. Regrettably, what looks good in text editor screen doesn't look good when making corrections to drafts, and that doesn't look good when printed and served to the reading public, so I need different layouts for different purposes. I used to edit text in OpenOffice.org, but regrettably, I'm too lazy to built byzantine OpenDocument XSLTs and the macro language in OO.o is pretty cryptic, so altering the styles automatically is hard. And, of course, the new old laptop is too puny to run OpenOffice.org in first place.

Therefore, I've switched to LaTeX as my work document format. PDFs for the website are easy to make, and Draft Printout is a script that produces a draft-format LaTeX file with word counts, all proper date annotations, etc.

The name is tentative. The script has gone through a lot of versions and it's currently based on Ruby and Liquid template language. It will be released later, as soon as I clean it up a bit.

Conman's Dictionary

I've been creating a dictionary for the Avarthrelian variation of the elvish language. Conman's Dictionary is a simple Java application for maintaining a bilingual dictionary. It will eventually be here; as of the time this particular text was written, the UI code was in middle of a giant overhaul. Meanwhile, I've tried to scare people with the obligatory UML diagram.