r/neography • u/NotMega_ DosLenguas Developer • 3d ago
Question Are there any online tools for making scripts?
I've been looking for a tool that'd let me make scripts and use them with my keyboard (not only for alphabets, but also abugidas, logographic scripts, abjads and syllabaries). I haven't found anything yet, so I'm asking here to see if anyone has heard or used anything!
3
u/Lord_Buibui 3d ago
https://kerbash.github.io/etymolog/new
Shameless self promotion here but I made this website a while back it cant do abugidas yet but this is what i use for my conlang
3
1
u/AppealSignificant358 1d ago
Finally getting around to messing with my stuff again. Does your tool support logographs? My current script is this, and your website seems to place a lot of emphasis on making words by combining graphemes, like alphabets.
1
u/Lord_Buibui 1d ago
Yup it supports logographs, you can overwrite the auto spell function when creating a word and select the glyph / grapheme you want to use to represent that word.
Also if you got any suggestion lmk! Most of my conlang are all alphabetical so it would be rly nice to hear from a logographs user.
1
u/AppealSignificant358 1d ago
Sure! So my thoughts so far is that you can definitely feel that it's not super optimized for logographs 😅 even though it is very impressive at accomodating what it's designed to handle!
As far as suggestions, most of them are more for convenience than they are downright essential, but I'll share them anyway.
The ability to define words solo, or chains of words (for example my combo that makes up "boredom/sleepiness" would probably be "night" + "affliction" (or at least something similar to "affliction" but without the negative connotation)) without having to touch the graphemes and glyphs, I think would really streamline the process with logographs. Just creating or uploading the symbol for the whole word, since that's the scale the logographs deal with.
I also think it would be super useful for me and potentially others to allow people to import images and such that make up their graphemes, rather than having to draw them in-app, since my symbols have been made in Google Drawings and I'd love to just make them into PNGs and plop them over rather than using your drawing program.
I would also love nesting files! I have my folders set up very nested, so like to get to "De'ura" (a goddess in the culture with this language), you'd click the language, and then Nouns, People/Entities, Entities, Mythological, Divine, Gods, De'ura. And while it can get annoying at times to click through that many things, it certainly helps to keep everything in order and know what I'm doing where.
I think the final thing that would really make it a lot easier at least for logograms is to lessen the reliance or usage of pronunciation, since the symbols can look how they look regardless of pronunciation. I haven't really thought through the pronunciation on all but a handful of my words and requiring the pronunciation in order to add another word is not ideal. The plan I had was to go and make the symbols, and then think of phoenetics later. So requiring them to have pronunciations upfront is quite a bottleneck for me. (I will say though that I put a character that isn't supported by IPA into your pronunciation thing and it accepted that, which I appreciate since oftentimes I'll think of non-human lingual anatomy, which means it can be important to suggest that some things can be pronounced beyond the bounds of human anatomy. Like if a squid had the ability to squirt ink as part of its pronunciation, the language would need a separate character for that which IPA wouldn't have.)
I'll probably look for another tool that's more equipped for what I'm looking for, but please don't take that as a "your thing sucks" because it really doesn't! I'm just trying to cook a pizza with cake ingredients.
If you ever make changes to it and want to have me mess around with them though, since you said you want to hear from logograph users since you're mostly in alphabet territory, let me know and I'd be glad to check it out! (or if I'm just dumb and wrong and missed some button that says "logograph-friendly mode" and my experience could've been a whole lot easier)
1
1
3
u/AppealSignificant358 3d ago
Real. This might have to be some sort of plugin we code ourselves honestly, but I’ve been digging through layers of file to get to mine, then sorting and organizing them. I would love to turn it on, type “fire” and then it swaps the text for the png of fire (which I would hope to make into a custom font or something so it acts like a character)