What a day, what a day: A story, a dictionary, and stuff

Today, a lot of good things happened.

A mystery that had puzzled me for a while was solved. Specifically, how to make pdfTeX read my eps graphics. You don't. You convert them to encapsulated PDF. Duh. Well, now, the web page has Shadows Over Nothross in both one-sided and two-sided format, using pdfTeX, so the files are also a bit smaller. I know users don't care about little details like this (the dvips/GhostScript-generated PDFs are a bit larger than pdfTeX ones, that's all!), but it makes me happy. =)

Today, I actually finished a new story, though so far, it's only out there in Finnish - I tried writing a story in Finnish just to see if it made things any faster. It didn't, really, but at least it seemed faster, somehow I was able to fix issues much faster too. Overall, the writing process wasn't that bad. Hopefully soon, English speakers will also be able to... enjoy... Faira's and Lex's dramacomedic adventures in the world of art and auctions. Oh, wait. So it turns out the second story about Faira and Lex was published before the first one was properly out. Uh... well, as long as I'm writing stuff, it shouldn't matter. Basically, this story is set in time before the Revolution; Faira and Lex are just ordinary rogues in Anchorfall. So this story is a little bit different from the adventuring company stories, and it's a bit less "fantastic". I kind of went to "Lovejoy + a few good-hearted rogues + a little bit of Komisario Palmu." Well, it's hopefully a working mix...

And today, I might as well announce my Silly Conlang Plans about the particular Avarthrelian variant of Elvish. It's been brewing in Wiki for a while. Now it's taking some form. Today, I moved the dictionary from wiki to dictd format.

Also, don't do this:

• Install "dicttools" package which apparently is used to format dictd databases.
• Build Debian package, notice it depends on a nonexistent package called "cost".
• Download cost. Notice the distinct lack of "debian" tools. Delete dicttools package, redownload because you deleted the dicttools file already when you got the .deb built.
• Mess around for a while to get a library called "cost" to install. It uses autotools, but the bloody thing ignores my--prefix parameter and installs to /usr. And people wonder why people hate tcl. Oh, and the "costsh" is naturally not built by default.
• can't make dicttools's dict2dict to actually find my SGML catalog. But it formats the stuff nevertheless! Weird!
• Damn this confusing crap. Time to whip out Perl and XML::Twig.
• no wait!
• apt-get install dictfmt

You'll just waste a hour and get completely unjustifiably annoyed towards Tcl and SGML. =)