------------ top of page -------------- |In olden times when wishing still helped one, there lived a king whose| |daughters were all beautiful; and the youngest was so beautiful that| |the sun itself, which has seen so much, was astonished whenever it| |shone in her face. Close by the king's castle lay a great dark forest,| |and under an old lime-tree in the forest was a well, and when the| |day was very warm, the king's child went out into the forest and sat| |down by the side of the cool fountain; and when she was bored she| |took a golden ball, and threw it up on high and caught it; and this| |ball was her favorite plaything. | |Some people prefer to have the right edge of their text look 'solid',| |by setting periods, commas, and other punctuation marks (including in-| |serted hyphens) in the right-hand margin. For example, this practice| |is occasionally used in contemporary advertising. It is easy to get| |inserted hyphens into the margin: We simply let the width of the| |corresponding penalty item be zero. And it is almost as easy to do| |the same for periods and other symbols, by putting every such char-| |acter in a box of width zero and adding the actual symbol width to| |the glue that follows. If no break occurs at this glue, the accumu-| |lated width is the same as before; and if a break does occur, the| |line will be justified as if the period or other symbol were not pre-| |sent. | |That double-dot you see above some letters--they're the same thing,| |right? No! Although they look the same, the two are actually very| |different, and not at all interchangeable. An umlaut is used in Ger-| |manic languages, and merely means that the primary vowel (a, o, or| |u) is followed by an e. It is a shorthand for (initially) handwrit-| |ing: ä is more or less interchangeable with ae (not to be confused| |with the ae ligature), ö is oe (again, not oe ligature), and ü is| |ue. This, of course, changes the pronunciation of the vowel, just as| |adding an e to an English word (at the end) shifts the vowel sound| |(e.g., mat to mate). Some word spellings, especially for proper names,| |may prefer one or the other form (usually _e). Whether to use the| |umlaut form or the two-letter form is usually an arbitrary choice in| |electronic typesetting, unless the chosen font lacks the umlaut form| |(as well as a combining "dieresis" character). It is more common in| |English-language cold metal typesetting to lack the umlaut form, and| |require the two-letter form. See also thorn and "ye", where the "e"| |was originally written as a superscript to the thorn (þ). | |Though the Pearl measures less than 50 miles in total length| |from its modest source as a cool mountain spring to the| |screaming cascades and steaming estuary of its downstream| |reaches, over those miles, the river has in one place or| |another everything you could possibly ask for. You can| |roam among lush temperate rain forests, turgid white water| |canyons, contemplative meanders among aisles of staid aspens| |(with trout leaping to slurp all the afternoon insects from| |its calm surface), and forbidding swamp land as formidable| |as any that Humphrey Bogart muddled through in The African| |Queen. | ------------ bottom of page -----------