TeX helps you learn Chinese character meanings
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Hoenig, Alan
I’ve recently used XeTeX to typeset and maintain a manuscript which develops a mnemonic technique for remembering the meanings for the 2000 most common Chinese characters. Following a brief introduction to this method, I discuss how painless XeTeX makes it to typeset Chinese and English together, and how TeX makes it (relatively) simple to implement this memory method in a handbook such as this. Some concluding comments emphasize aspects that are familiar to old TeX-hands, but may be overlooked by newer users. Because TeX source is ASCII text (or its Unicode extension), it’s easy to manage and maintain the information in these source files in a straightforward way via Perl or any other scripting language. TeX coding often becomes simpler, as it’s possible for Perl to make some decisions (not typesetting ones, to be sure) for you, so your TeX macros have less work to do.
 My story begins about six or seven years ago now, when on a whim, I decided to study Mandarin Chinese. I've had a lot of these whims often over the years, and I know myself well enough to know that sooner or later these whims almost always burn themselves out, which is why this time I decided to focus on the interesting stuff and to the, at the expense of what I thought was the dull material. In this case, the dull stuff was the Chinese characters in their meanings, which I never thought I would really, would really contribute to my, to studying. Anyway, days, months, and now years have passed and I stayed intrigued, and so I realized it was a mistake to have ignored them. However, studying Chinese characters is not an easy thing, and it turned out to be way too tough for me. I couldn't, it was just impossible for me to, to get a handle on more than a handful of, of characters accurately enough anyway, to, to make any real headway in, in, in my studying. This was, as you can imagine, pretty frustrating, but before, before ditching everything, I decided to, I realized it couldn't hurt to apply one of the great lessons of metaphone. That is, instead of actually studying material, I decided to step back and, and think about how to study the material. I looked around to see what other people had to say on this matter and what methods that they used, and then I came up with the following scheme, seems to work pretty well. I took as an initial pool the 2,000 most frequently used characters, using the so-called simplified characters that are in use in mainland China, and I imposed an order on them, not an alphabetical or numerical order, but one based on how complex, how easy or difficult it is to write these characters. I arranged them from simplest to, simplest to hardest, and I used an induction-based learning scheme, relying on three essential platforms. Number one, the form and meaning of each, of any character depends only on the form and meanings of characters that have appeared earlier in the sequence. Second, it's possible to remember the character and its meaning by means of relatively simple and straightforward mnemonic narratives, which use the prior characters as elements in this mnemonic story. These characters are already known because they come earlier in the sequence. And finally, the initial item in the sequence has to be easy enough to be learned all by itself. And as far as these mnemonics go, any kind of story connecting the components, any pun, any play on words, any kind of outlandish scenario is all legitimate. As we create this, admittedly, a historical and unconventional method for remembering the character's meaning. Anyway, let me just show you just a moment or two. Let me just show you how this system works. Okay, the first three characters in the meaning are conveniently enough already up on the screen. The first character over on the left is clearly the easiest character of all to write. And by great good fortune, its meaning is one. So there isn't much mnemonics involved. Why is it lying down? I was tired of using the Windows computer to get it self-working. The next two characters also, by great good fortune, are built only out of horizontal strokes. They have the meanings two and three, and I don't even have to tell you which is which. However, it's not possible to create any further characters without introducing new components. And here I'm using the word component to refer to a geometric form, hopefully simple, but sometimes not. A geometric form that cannot stand independently by itself as a character, but which is used reasonably frequently in character formation. The first component, so this is the first or about 100 components that need to be introduced. And it's simply a vertical stroke that looks like a stick. And in any one of these mnemonic stories, we'll let this kind of a stick represent either a tool like a primitive hoe or perhaps a scepter to represent the authority of a leader or a political figure. The next character in the sequence is a simple cross comprised of a bar and a scepter. Its Chinese meaning is ten, and since it looks like a T, it's pretty easy to remember because the T stands for ten. But also, if you find that somehow unsatisfactory, you can imagine trying to stand this character up on a platform on a table. And naturally the character will tip 45 degrees to the left or right until it comes to rest as an X, which is the Roman numeral whose value is ten. The next character in the sequence is the, you can imagine it as the character for two with the scepter between the two strokes. You can do that, but it takes work to pry the two strokes apart. And indeed the primary meaning for this character is indeed work. Using the scepter as a tool, or as a primitive hoe that you use in the springtime to plant, you can imagine that the top bar represents the top surface of the soil, and the bottom bar represents the depth to which you have to, or whatever you do with hose, to turn the soil over. And as it happens, under that, that's a convenient interpretation because the primary meaning of that left character is indeed earth or soil. But sometimes in times of drought, not an afforded to go around, the soil gets very crumbly and dusty, thank you. And you can imagine that when you try to hoe in those conditions, the hoe goes all the way down to the ground until the top of it is flush with the top of the soil, something like the right character shows. The primary meaning for this character is draw. Finally, the next character consists of, you can imagine, consisting of the character for one, the character for two. Both of those characters being transfixed by the scepter component. And one interpretation in this method might be, well, this represents somebody, represents someone to lead. And the primary meaning for this character is king. So in the same way, more or less the same way, I proceeded to go on and develop stories for 2,178 characters. Using tech, or actually the Jonathan Q's Z-Tech variant, it was a snap to typeset all this material as a book, and here is one of these pages. Okay, and all these, the book is organized as a series of panels, and each of these panels has more or less the same structure. The reading or focusing, for example, of the top story on that page, you see all these panels are numbered consecutively, the number appears first, followed by the Chinese character, typeset twice in two different Chinese fonts. Now, I don't really know how the Chinese refer to those two different fonts. I, myself, tilt to think of them as the equivalent of serif and the equivalent of sans serif. Following that is a primary definition, typeset in a bold font, followed by a decomposition, and then finally the pinyin for that character. So, that's not really, especially legible. Let's see. How do you make it larger? I don't know if I did it the wrong way. How do you make it larger? No, that's a great idea. Oh, okay. Let's do that. There we go. Thank you. Okay, so, uh... That wasn't quite as easy as I was supposed to do. Okay, so, um... The decomposition refers to the fact that I thought it would be convenient to show how the prior characters contribute to the form of the current character. For example, in this topmost panel, the left part of the character is the Earth character that we just saw a moment ago. In the book, it appears as panel number nine. The right part of the character is a character, I haven't discussed it yet. It's a character that means inside, and it appears on panel number 71, which I guess is the bottommost panel on the preceding page. The... All the way over on the left, all the way along the right, is the so-called Pinyin pronunciation, which is the official transcription method in use in mainland China. The central part of any panel is, of course, the mnemonic story, which sort of appears in the central position. And I use a couple of typographic clues, which I hope will make it easier for the reader to make sense of. Any references to the current character always appear in boldface, and any references to the components of the current character appear in an italic typeface. And finally, just for fun, some additional information. There are a number of strokes that Chinese scribes prescribe for that character, and the actual frequency ring for that particular character. Not as easy as it looks. I have no idea what I want. That's a... Okay, well, I just wanted to make mention, and because I'm so grateful, for the typeface that I used for this book, which was designed by Philip Pol. It's called Linux Libertine, who made it available, I guess under the new license, made it available for free use by people. It was an absolute snap to install, at least under ZTAC on the Mac platform. It was an absolute snap to install, and once you do so, you get the full range of all the proper tech behavior. Small caps, ligatures, bold italic, bold italic, the whole suite. The thing I really like about this font is that you also get a very intriguing new ligature, the capital T, uppercase T, lowercase H, which, as you can imagine, gets used all the time. Anyway, the result of typesetting all this material was a book. It had always been a dream of mine to actually, at least on a small scale basis, go into the publishing business, and so I took advantage of this opportunity to do so. Here's the... Well, here's part... Here's the... Slowly unfolding the cover for this. Let's see if we can do something about that. Is this available here? Sorry? Is it available here? No. Books are heavy. I didn't bring any on the plane. So anyway, this is roughly the cover for that first book. I'm having a blast as this setting up this new company. It's an experience that I recommend highly to anybody. You never... All kinds of new things happen that you never anticipated, and it's really just a lot of fun. I set up a company. I call myself EasyChinese.com. And I hope you could all make out my contact information. There's a reason for displaying that, and that has to do with the reason why I want to make a presentation this afternoon is because I realize I am no topographer. And one of my reasons for making this presentation was to solicit advice. And so I really hope that anybody with suggestions for improvement, make things look a little better, make presentation a little clearer, will get in touch with me either in the next few days here in San Francisco or later on via email. This book is the first in the... In what I hope will be a series of EasyChinese guides. This one, this current one, the next best seller, is currently at the printers even as we speak. You can think of it as a translation guide. There's about 3,000 menu items given in Chinese characters and their opinion equivalents with the translation. So that next time you find yourself traveling in mainland China, you'll be able to better partake of the dining experience. As you can imagine, the format for this page is going to be a lot different. It's organized very differently. Again, the purpose of the format was to make it easy for somebody in a restaurant to easily figure out how to look things up, to easily show it, point things out to waiters and other assistants who can help them. Don't want to waste too much time. Everybody's hungry. Waiters are busy. And so you need it to go as fast as you can. A third volume, one that I'm hard at work on, is similar to the one that I've been speaking about, but it deals with the traditional characters as opposed to the simplified characters. These are the characters that were in existence and exclusively in use up until the 1950s. I've got a... I'm currently exploring slightly different formatting techniques for these panels. And I'd like to show them to you today, this proposed new format with some comments. The only real new information that I'm showing, you can see in the second line, both of these panels are referred to the same character. The new information really refers to what are called stroke order diagrams. The recipes are actually how to show you to actually how to write one of these characters correctly. And although this is not really a handwriting manual, it turns out that for reviewing characters, to make sure you really know it, it's nice to be able to draw the character in the air. And so to that end, it's helpful to know the correct way to draw it. I've also experimented with some new fonts. It's come to my attention just a few weeks ago that Google seems to be assembling a whole new bunch of fonts. I think their stated goal is to make the web a more beautiful place. But I suspect another goal is to also increase legibility on small size screens, on cell phones and so on, that are under the control of their Android operating system. Anyway, some of their fonts really are, in my opinion, absolutely stunning. And again, when you use them on Z-Tec, they just work right out of the box. Well, it's unfortunate. Let's see if I can bump up the... The topmost panel is typesetting a font called Old Standard. There's a font designed by Alexei Krugov in Russia. I don't know why he calls it Old Standard, because to all intents and purposes, it's really a monotype of a font. And it's clearly a monotype modern font. These are a family of fonts that are long out of fashion, but intensely, really quite beautiful, very, very legible. And of course, their spirit lives on by virtue of the fact that one of those fonts served as model for computer modern. The font below it is an example of something called Joyd Serif and Joyd Sans Serif fonts. These are fonts that are really quite handsome also, and they are really significantly more legible, at small point sizes than any of their... any of their... any other fonts. I recently switched to the Joyd Sans Serif monofont on my... on the version of Emacs that I use, and on my terminal program, and my eyes are very, very grateful. It was only at the conclusion... virtually at the conclusion of the book that I learned that I learned that a little bit too late. I learned a very important lesson from it. I'm a little afraid that old tech hands in the room will laugh at me, but I'd like to... I'd like to bring it to your attention because other people just starting out or doing... contemplating a project similar to this can probably benefit. At the outset of this program, I viewed this project, really, as if it was just another letter or another article, but just writ some... somehow just writ large, okay? This is where I went wrong. I now realize that it's far better to view this... to view this project as one centered around data management, and type setting and whatever else that needs to be done occupies a more peripheral position. This project and... and similar ones such as catalogs, dictionaries and psychopedias, collections of letters, comprise a sequence of records, each one of which will have a very similar structure. In my case, each record corresponds to a Chinese character, and we can imagine that the structure for a record... the other way... the structure for the record looks in a very abbreviated and a very simplified form, something like this. Really, what's going on is that the typeset format that you envision at the beginning of a project is essentially never the format that you... that you'll have, that you'll decide upon, that you'll... at the end of the project. But if you forego the... the data format in favor... in favor of creating a type setting command right from the get-go, then... then you'll find it challenging to... to force a command... to force a command created when you had one format in mind, to... to force it to create a very different kind of format. In my view, it's much better to create a data structure like this, and accompany it with a... with a... with a... with a script written in a language like Perl or Python or something like that, and have the Perl... have the Perl... your Perl script generate the text source... the text source file whenever you need it. The big win here is that when you do change formats, you'll be able to quickly... you'll be able to really easily make revisions in your Perl script, and so the result will be text source file that parallels your... your... your... your document structure a little bit more closely, a little bit more carefully. Bear in mind, though, that of course, a... a script written in a language like Perl or Visual Basic or something like that can't make any type setting decisions, but almost always there's lots of other stuff going on that for which Perl works just... just fine. Moreover, in specialized projects, some of us... such as these, you find yourself needing to create auxiliary material, material that's typically not the kind that Latech knows how to... how to... how to create, or at least right out of the box. In my case, such material included some electronic flashcard files, some review material, some graded... some graded reading practice, but in other contexts might include price lists or special purpose indices or glossaries or something like that. And I just find that it's much easier to generate this lot from a well-organized data file than it is from some messy text source file. Okay, well, that's about it. I have no more comments to make. I'd like to thank you for your attention. During the talk, a lot of which was really just shameless self-promotion. I appreciate your silence. Alright, thank you, Alan, for a very fascinating talk. Wait, I'm just sick for the microphone. Thank you. So, your driver, besides this, was Perl, right? I do, yes. So, you took this text database, did Perl processing and got a book? Well, no, no. You do Perl processing, you get a text source file, you run Z-Tech, then you get Perl. Yes, that's what I meant. You had text format, Perl gives you tech, and from tech you get PDF or DBI, whatever. Thank you. Thank you, Alan, for a fascinating talk, especially if you're someone who's just contemplating learnings in Chinese, essentially. But my important question is, do you need a field tester for the menu? Field tester, why? Field tester for the book on food, because I'm volunteering. Well, maybe we can arrange something later on. I'm a model of consistency. Alan, when you're trying to read a Chinese menu, what's the, in the visual process, what's the probability of a typographical error on your part and a surprise when the meal comes out? Well, you're always surprised when the meal comes out. Wait until I get some field testing done, then we can talk. Thank you.
 My story begins about six or seven years ago now, when on a whim, I decided to study Mandarin Chinese.  I've had a lot of these whims often over the years, and I know myself well enough to know that sooner or later  these whims almost always burn themselves out, which is why this time I decided to focus on the interesting stuff  and to the, at the expense of what I thought was the dull material.  In this case, the dull stuff was the Chinese characters in their meanings, which I never thought I would really, would really contribute to my, to studying.  Anyway, days, months, and now years have passed and I stayed intrigued, and so I realized it was a mistake to have ignored them.  However, studying Chinese characters is not an easy thing, and it turned out to be way too tough for me.  I couldn't, it was just impossible for me to, to get a handle on more than a handful of, of characters accurately enough anyway, to, to make any real headway in, in, in my studying.  This was, as you can imagine, pretty frustrating, but before, before ditching everything, I decided to, I realized it couldn't hurt to apply one of the great lessons of metaphone.  That is, instead of actually studying material, I decided to step back and, and think about how to study the material.  I looked around to see what other people had to say on this matter and what methods that they used, and then I came up with the following scheme, seems to work pretty well.  I took as an initial pool the 2,000 most frequently used characters, using the so-called simplified characters that are in use in mainland China,  and I imposed an order on them, not an alphabetical or numerical order, but one based on how complex, how easy or difficult it is to write these characters.  I arranged them from simplest to, simplest to hardest, and I used an induction-based learning scheme, relying on three essential platforms.  Number one, the form and meaning of each, of any character depends only on the form and meanings of characters that have appeared earlier in the sequence.  Second, it's possible to remember the character and its meaning by means of relatively simple and straightforward mnemonic narratives, which use the prior characters as elements in this mnemonic story.  These characters are already known because they come earlier in the sequence.  And finally, the initial item in the sequence has to be easy enough to be learned all by itself.  And as far as these mnemonics go, any kind of story connecting the components, any pun, any play on words, any kind of outlandish scenario is all legitimate.  As we create this, admittedly, a historical and unconventional method for remembering the character's meaning.  Anyway, let me just show you just a moment or two. Let me just show you how this system works.  Okay, the first three characters in the meaning are conveniently enough already up on the screen.  The first character over on the left is clearly the easiest character of all to write.  And by great good fortune, its meaning is one.  So there isn't much mnemonics involved.  Why is it lying down?  I was tired of using the Windows computer to get it self-working.  The next two characters also, by great good fortune, are built only out of horizontal strokes.  They have the meanings two and three, and I don't even have to tell you which is which.  However, it's not possible to create any further characters without introducing new components.  And here I'm using the word component to refer to a geometric form, hopefully simple, but sometimes not.  A geometric form that cannot stand independently by itself as a character,  but which is used reasonably frequently in character formation.  The first component, so this is the first or about 100 components that need to be introduced.  And it's simply a vertical stroke that looks like a stick.  And in any one of these mnemonic stories, we'll let this kind of a stick represent either a tool like a primitive hoe  or perhaps a scepter to represent the authority of a leader or a political figure.  The next character in the sequence is a simple cross comprised of a bar and a scepter.  Its Chinese meaning is ten, and since it looks like a T, it's pretty easy to remember because the T stands for ten.  But also, if you find that somehow unsatisfactory, you can imagine trying to stand this character up on a platform on a table.  And naturally the character will tip 45 degrees to the left or right until it comes to rest as an X,  which is the Roman numeral whose value is ten.  The next character in the sequence is the, you can imagine it as the character for two with the scepter between the two strokes.  You can do that, but it takes work to pry the two strokes apart.  And indeed the primary meaning for this character is indeed work.  Using the scepter as a tool, or as a primitive hoe that you use in the springtime to plant,  you can imagine that the top bar represents the top surface of the soil,  and the bottom bar represents the depth to which you have to, or whatever you do with hose, to turn the soil over.  And as it happens, under that, that's a convenient interpretation because the primary meaning of that left character is indeed earth or soil.  But sometimes in times of drought, not an afforded to go around, the soil gets very crumbly and dusty, thank you.  And you can imagine that when you try to hoe in those conditions, the hoe goes all the way down to the ground until the top of it is flush with the top of the soil,  something like the right character shows.  The primary meaning for this character is draw.  Finally, the next character consists of, you can imagine, consisting of the character for one, the character for two.  Both of those characters being transfixed by the scepter component.  And one interpretation in this method might be, well, this represents somebody, represents someone to lead.  And the primary meaning for this character is king.  So in the same way, more or less the same way, I proceeded to go on and develop stories for 2,178 characters.  Using tech, or actually the Jonathan Q's Z-Tech variant, it was a snap to typeset all this material as a book, and here is one of these pages.  Okay, and all these, the book is organized as a series of panels, and each of these panels has more or less the same structure.  The reading or focusing, for example, of the top story on that page, you see all these panels are numbered consecutively, the number appears first,  followed by the Chinese character, typeset twice in two different Chinese fonts.  Now, I don't really know how the Chinese refer to those two different fonts.  I, myself, tilt to think of them as the equivalent of serif and the equivalent of sans serif.  Following that is a primary definition, typeset in a bold font, followed by a decomposition, and then finally the pinyin for that character.  So, that's not really, especially legible.  Let's see.  How do you make it larger?  I don't know if I did it the wrong way.  How do you make it larger?  No, that's a great idea.  Oh, okay. Let's do that.  There we go.  Thank you.  Okay, so, uh...  That wasn't quite as easy as I was supposed to do.  Okay, so, um...  The decomposition refers to the fact that I thought it would be convenient to show how the prior characters contribute to the form of the current character.  For example, in this topmost panel, the left part of the character is the Earth character that we just saw a moment ago.  In the book, it appears as panel number nine.  The right part of the character is a character, I haven't discussed it yet.  It's a character that means inside, and it appears on panel number 71, which I guess is the bottommost panel on the preceding page.  The...  All the way over on the left, all the way along the right, is the so-called Pinyin pronunciation, which is the official transcription method in use in mainland China.  The central part of any panel is, of course, the mnemonic story, which sort of appears in the central position.  And I use a couple of typographic clues, which I hope will make it easier for the reader to make sense of.  Any references to the current character always appear in boldface, and any references to the components of the current character appear in an italic typeface.  And finally, just for fun, some additional information.  There are a number of strokes that Chinese scribes prescribe for that character, and the actual frequency ring for that particular character.  Not as easy as it looks.  I have no idea what I want.  That's a...  Okay, well, I just wanted to make mention, and because I'm so grateful, for the typeface that I used for this book, which was designed by Philip Pol.  It's called Linux Libertine, who made it available, I guess under the new license, made it available for free use by people.  It was an absolute snap to install, at least under ZTAC on the Mac platform.  It was an absolute snap to install, and once you do so, you get the full range of all the proper tech behavior.  Small caps, ligatures, bold italic, bold italic, the whole suite.  The thing I really like about this font is that you also get a very intriguing new ligature, the capital T, uppercase T, lowercase H, which, as you can imagine, gets used all the time.  Anyway, the result of typesetting all this material was a book.  It had always been a dream of mine to actually, at least on a small scale basis, go into the publishing business, and so I took advantage of this opportunity to do so.  Here's the...  Well, here's part...  Here's the...  Slowly unfolding the cover for this.  Let's see if we can do something about that.  Is this available here?  Sorry?  Is it available here?  No.  Books are heavy. I didn't bring any on the plane.  So anyway, this is roughly the cover for that first book.  I'm having a blast as this setting up this new company.  It's an experience that I recommend highly to anybody.  You never...  All kinds of new things happen that you never anticipated, and it's really just a lot of fun.  I set up a company.  I call myself EasyChinese.com.  And I hope you could all make out my contact information.  There's a reason for displaying that, and that has to do with the reason why I want to make a presentation this afternoon is because I realize I am no topographer.  And one of my reasons for making this presentation was to solicit advice.  And so I really hope that anybody with suggestions for improvement, make things look a little better, make presentation a little clearer, will get in touch with me either in the next few days here in San Francisco or later on via email.  This book is the first in the...  In what I hope will be a series of EasyChinese guides.  This one, this current one, the next best seller, is currently at the printers even as we speak.  You can think of it as a translation guide.  There's about 3,000 menu items given in Chinese characters and their opinion equivalents with the translation.  So that next time you find yourself traveling in mainland China, you'll be able to better partake of the dining experience.  As you can imagine, the format for this page is going to be a lot different.  It's organized very differently.  Again, the purpose of the format was to make it easy for somebody in a restaurant to easily figure out how to look things up, to easily show it, point things out to waiters and other assistants who can help them.  Don't want to waste too much time. Everybody's hungry. Waiters are busy.  And so you need it to go as fast as you can.  A third volume, one that I'm hard at work on, is similar to the one that I've been speaking about, but it deals with the traditional characters as opposed to the simplified characters.  These are the characters that were in existence and exclusively in use up until the 1950s.  I've got a...  I'm currently exploring slightly different formatting techniques for these panels.  And I'd like to show them to you today, this proposed new format with some comments.  The only real new information that I'm showing, you can see in the second line, both of these panels are referred to the same character.  The new information really refers to what are called stroke order diagrams.  The recipes are actually how to show you to actually how to write one of these characters correctly.  And although this is not really a handwriting manual, it turns out that for reviewing characters, to make sure you really know it, it's nice to be able to draw the character in the air.  And so to that end, it's helpful to know the correct way to draw it.  I've also experimented with some new fonts.  It's come to my attention just a few weeks ago that Google seems to be assembling a whole new bunch of fonts.  I think their stated goal is to make the web a more beautiful place.  But I suspect another goal is to also increase legibility on small size screens, on cell phones and so on, that are under the control of their Android operating system.  Anyway, some of their fonts really are, in my opinion, absolutely stunning.  And again, when you use them on Z-Tec, they just work right out of the box.  Well, it's unfortunate.  Let's see if I can bump up the...  The topmost panel is typesetting a font called Old Standard.  There's a font designed by Alexei Krugov in Russia.  I don't know why he calls it Old Standard, because to all intents and purposes, it's really a monotype of a font.  And it's clearly a monotype modern font.  These are a family of fonts that are long out of fashion, but intensely, really quite beautiful, very, very legible.  And of course, their spirit lives on by virtue of the fact that one of those fonts served as model for computer modern.  The font below it is an example of something called Joyd Serif and Joyd Sans Serif fonts.  These are fonts that are really quite handsome also, and they are really significantly more legible,  at small point sizes than any of their... any of their... any other fonts.  I recently switched to the Joyd Sans Serif monofont on my... on the version of Emacs that I use,  and on my terminal program, and my eyes are very, very grateful.  It was only at the conclusion... virtually at the conclusion of the book that I learned that I learned that a little bit too late.  I learned a very important lesson from it.  I'm a little afraid that old tech hands in the room will laugh at me,  but I'd like to... I'd like to bring it to your attention because other people just starting out or doing...  contemplating a project similar to this can probably benefit.  At the outset of this program, I viewed this project, really, as if it was just another letter or another article,  but just writ some... somehow just writ large, okay?  This is where I went wrong.  I now realize that it's far better to view this... to view this project as one centered around data management,  and type setting and whatever else that needs to be done occupies a more peripheral position.  This project and... and similar ones such as catalogs, dictionaries and psychopedias, collections of letters,  comprise a sequence of records, each one of which will have a very similar structure.  In my case, each record corresponds to a Chinese character,  and we can imagine that the structure for a record...  the other way... the structure for the record looks in a very abbreviated and a very simplified form, something like this.  Really, what's going on is that the typeset format that you envision at the beginning of a project  is essentially never the format that you... that you'll have, that you'll decide upon, that you'll...  at the end of the project.  But if you forego the... the data format in favor... in favor of creating a type setting command right from the get-go,  then... then you'll find it challenging to... to force a command... to force a command created when you had one format in mind,  to... to force it to create a very different kind of format.  In my view, it's much better to create a data structure like this,  and accompany it with a... with a... with a... with a script written in a language like Perl or Python or something like that,  and have the Perl... have the Perl... your Perl script generate the text source... the text source file whenever you need it.  The big win here is that when you do change formats, you'll be able to quickly... you'll be able to really easily make revisions in your Perl script,  and so the result will be text source file that parallels your... your... your... your document structure a little bit more closely, a little bit more carefully.  Bear in mind, though, that of course, a... a script written in a language like Perl or Visual Basic or something like that  can't make any type setting decisions, but almost always there's lots of other stuff going on that for which Perl works just... just fine.  Moreover, in specialized projects, some of us... such as these, you find yourself needing to create auxiliary material,  material that's typically not the kind that Latech knows how to... how to... how to create, or at least right out of the box.  In my case, such material included some electronic flashcard files, some review material, some graded... some graded reading practice,  but in other contexts might include price lists or special purpose indices or glossaries or something like that.  And I just find that it's much easier to generate this lot from a well-organized data file than it is from some messy text source file.  Okay, well, that's about it. I have no more comments to make.  I'd like to thank you for your attention. During the talk, a lot of which was really just shameless self-promotion.  I appreciate your silence.  Alright, thank you, Alan, for a very fascinating talk. Wait, I'm just sick for the microphone. Thank you. So, your driver, besides this, was Perl, right?  I do, yes.  So, you took this text database, did Perl processing and got a book?  Well, no, no. You do Perl processing, you get a text source file, you run Z-Tech, then you get Perl.  Yes, that's what I meant. You had text format, Perl gives you tech, and from tech you get PDF or DBI, whatever. Thank you.  Thank you, Alan, for a fascinating talk, especially if you're someone who's just contemplating learnings in Chinese, essentially.  But my important question is, do you need a field tester for the menu?  Field tester, why?  Field tester for the book on food, because I'm volunteering.  Well, maybe we can arrange something later on.  I'm a model of consistency. Alan, when you're trying to read a Chinese menu, what's the, in the visual process, what's the probability of a typographical error on your part and a surprise when the meal comes out?  Well, you're always surprised when the meal comes out.  Wait until I get some field testing done, then we can talk.  Thank you.
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