The Problem

Typing Latin is a “Lossy” Conversion

It is hard to type up text in Latin, even harder to type up with text in verse. But with latintools, a Mac, LaTeX, and Textmate, you can make beautiful documents.

Let’s start with a standard picture of the Æneid by Vergil. This picture comes from the version translated by Clyde Pharr and published by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers.

When beginners are encountering Latin text, the text is presented, usually, with extra information. As you can see from the sample, this includes information about the quantity of the syllables. We denote these by using macrons. You can see a macron above “o” for “cano” and elsewhere.

A naïve first step is to write this all out.

This has drawbacks

1. Most people type much faster than they can write longhand
2. My handwriting is terrible
3. It’s a lot easier to read and review typed text later.

Further, if you’re studying poetry, you may want to add scansion. Information about the full metrical property of the line.

For me though, I like to have a lasting and pretty version to look at during study time or even years later.

So you might decide to type it up.

But we lost the macron data. So how can you type macrons? Painfully.

This is the picker approach. Windows applications have a similar interface.

Can you touch-type through a picker? Certainly the “type a few letters and then go through re-applying macrons” is a process that leaves a lot to be desired. And well, manually marking up text is just kinda sad

A Better Solution

Is there a language that allows us to emulate macrons in ASCII? Bonus if it makes beautiful text….yes! It’s LaTeX!

OK, so LaTeX is a promising direction. But isn’t it hard to set up?

No! Thanks to Allan Odgaard’s Textmate ( the editor of the geeky OSX programmer, pace emacs users ) makes it easy!

Now, if you use the template and then simply use (⌘ + r) to compile it into a basic PDF. Much like HTML, LaTeX can take a lifetime to master, but within a focused hour you can have the basics.

The Default LaTeX template, complied by using ⌘ + r from Textmate and using the Skim editor

But we still have a problem, it’s not much easier to type “backslash,equals,brace,letter,brace” than it was to go to the character picker. That’s where latintools’, the Textmate bundle, LatinStudent, comes in. Then, when in the TeX scope (which includes LaTeX) you need merely only type (⌃ + [aeiou]) or (⌃ + ⇧ + [AEIOU]) to get your full population of macrons! In fact, that’s how I added all those macron-enabled characters in the screenshots above.

I used this to type up all of my exercises in Wheelock’s Latin. I would type up the given, and then type in my English answer. It’s entirely usable as a touch-typist!

I typed up the first four lines in about a minute. Let’s look at the result.

Oops, I forgot to force newlines! Thanks to Textmate, (⌘ + ⌥+r) and ‘perl -pe ’s/$/\\\\/’ voilà it’s fixed.

Great! We’re much better off than using Word — look at those beautiful ligatures!

Moving to Poetry

The above technique, with a little LaTeX knowledge will let you type up your homework and have beautiful latin references for years to come. For help with the LaTeX I refer to “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System” by Leslie Lamport. I bought it for $2.00 on abebooks.com. But let’s consider how to handle poetry.

How shall we enter our scansion data? We have this beautiful typeset text, it would be a crime to mark it up!

This makes Leslie Lamport cry!

That’s where the contents of latintools’ LaTeX_tools/latinpoetry.sty directory comes in. By sourcing this from the same directory where your .tex file is ( or by storing it in the TeX search path ) you need only add:

\usepackage{latinpoetry}

Re-build the PDF from within Textmate and…nothing happens. To get the scansion data, you need to mark the text up slightly differently. this is due to the way the metrica package, which is latinpoetry depends on, does its mark-up

Instead of:

Arma virumque can\={o}, Trojae qu\={\i} pr\={\i}mus ab \={o}r\={\i}s\\

It needs to be:

Arma virumque can\={o}, Trojae qu\={\macron i} pr\={\macron i}mus ab \={o}r\={\macron i}s\\

But wait, if “\={}” was a pain to type, this is even worse! This is no good from our touch-typing perspective. The LatinStudent Textmate bundle comes to your rescue again. Simply highlight the line(s) and press (&#x2318+d). It will do the transform for you by a process I call “Dactylize!”

Great, now we have the macron over the letter, and conveniently, long marks for the scansion.

Let’s fill in the rest of the scansion. The ‘meter’ package uses a \= before a letter to make a long scansion mark and a \’ to make a short. Look at the first line compared to the second.

		\=Arm\-a v\-ir\=umqu\-e c\-an\={\macron {o}}, Tr\=oj\={\ae} qu\={\macron {\i}} pr\={\macron {\i}}m\-us \-ab \={\macron {o}}r\={\macron {\i}}s\\
		\={\macron {I}}taliam f\={\macron {a}}t\={\macron {o}} profugus L\={\macron {a}}v\={\macron {\i}}naque v\={\macron {e}}nit\\

Not bad at all. Now you can format complete Latin Verse, with scansion.

Going further, as a study tool

In my case, as I’m taking an Æneid class, I need to take notes about what’s going on in a particular line, and often I need to correct my translation or make a note. Here again latinpoetry.sty comes to your rescue. Let’s convert the original, pre-Dactylized text into “latlines”

As you can see from the pic below, the result is a bit verbose, but when rendered it gives you a really nice box in which to make notes. You can print these out before class, or edit the text before class and impress the heck out of your classmates.

After class, I go back in and add my notes in situ so that it’s easier to remember the context around my discussions:

So there you go, these tools should help you be faster at dealing with macrons, converting text, and exploring the intricacies of the Latin Language.

Valete!