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Comment by dalke | Hacker News Reader

My imagination doesn't seem to be good enough. How should I write "Doña Ana, New Mexico is one of the few US place names with the letter 'ñ' in its official name."?

I can't just drop the tilde in both cases because then it doesn't make sense. The best I can come up with is (transliterated) "Dona Ana New Mexico where the first n has a tilde over it is one of the few US place names with a tilde in its official name."

That's cumbersome.

Without punctuation, how do you express "eats shoots and leaves" as being different from "eats, shoots and leaves"; that being the punchline to the joke ending "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves )

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Where does "without punctuation" come in to it? They say "Numbers and punctuation aren't altered." Sure enough, the bookmarklet doesn't remove punctuation.

Also, the bookmarklet seems to skip over paragraphs that have a character they can't represent. I tried it on your post and the paragraph with the 'ñ's wasn't altered.

Correct, punctuation is left alone since altering it would gain very little in the way of space efficiency.

> the bookmarklet seems to skip over paragraphs that have a character they can't represent

It's not that sophisticated. That's just due to the site's css specifying a font for some paragraphs and not others. Not sure the best way to get it to over-ride everything. I suppose it could be updated to crawl through the dom and append style attributes to all tags.

Re accents etc., currently they just show as normal letters (including the accents), which really isn't that bad. Ways to improve the situation could include squeezing some of the accents in by making their slant more vertical. Re ñ and ü, they could maybe be rotated 90 degrees, or maybe put beside the letters rather than on top of them. If there's a demand for this, it wouldn't take me long to throw a couple straw-man versions of the font out there.

Indeed, I missed that. The bookmarklet doesn't work for Safari and there's no easy way to test things out. ... A-ha! I can edit the DOM directly and see the updates.

It's implemented as a special font. That means I can put an ñ in the text and see the combination of dotsies and 'normal' text.

I needed to increase the font so I could distinguish the ":" and make out the doties. Even with the font enlargement, it was smaller than the original text. OTOH, I could reduce the normal text by a few font sizes, so the right comparison would require getting practice with both styles and figuring out what font size feels natural, and then make the comparison.

It doesn't seem worthwhile to do that.

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