What is this odd letter "E" ?

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Fri Mar 13, 2020 4:04 pm

My wife recently bought a new cookbook. In Chapter 3, and only in Chapter 3, the nutritional analysis paragraph of every recipe looks roughly like this:

Everywhere else in the book, the same section simply says CALORIES, exactly as we'd expect for a book written in English.

"CALORIES" does not translate to "CAERIES" in any language that I've tried, and for that matter I can't find that letter "E" with the double diacritical mark in any subset of Unicode that I've tried.

So I'm baffled.

Can anybody recognize what's going on here? Is there some plausible mechanism by which "LO" could turn into that odd typesetting symbol "E" with the double diacritical?

--Rik

TheLostVertex · Post by **TheLostVertex** » Fri Mar 13, 2020 10:29 pm

Looks like a circumflex with hook, used in Vietnamese. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ể

My guess is there was some software bug or corruption that happened during the production of the book, and L and O got merged into the wrong character. If one cared enough, you could likely track down what the character encoding used, based on the info we have.

Edit: forum software does not like that character in urls, and wiktionary does not allow escape characters in the url. Oh well.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sat Mar 14, 2020 12:17 am

forum software does not like that character in urls, and wiktionary does not allow escape characters in the url. Oh well.

Heh, we have a hack for that: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ể

The trick is to URL encode whatever the forum software doesn't like, then bury the whole mess inside a [url= tag pair so it looks right and also, separately, links to the right place. As code, it ends up looking like this:

Code: Select all

&#91;url=https&#58;//en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BB%83&#93;https&#58;//en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ể&#91;/url&#93;

Thanks for the tip about the weird character. I'll see if I can work out some details tomorrow.

Any ideas from other people would be very welcome also!

--Rik

Macro_Cosmos · Post by **Macro_Cosmos** » Sat Mar 14, 2020 11:03 am

This is pretty weird.

I did print an assignment on a friend's computer running some weird Chinese PDF reader, the result was all kinds of weirdness. All my inserted formula for example turned into series of gibberish that can't be comprehended at all. Whack Chinese characters that I don't recognise and doesn't even exist in typical dictionaries will show up too (must use online ones that include very obscure characters).

Luckily I found out before handing it in, saved a heart attack. I used adobe's PDF reader and the print was absolutely fine.

So I think this is some kind of bug/corruption, and it happened when the book was being printed. However, why did it only affect one chapter? Maybe they had different printers printing different chapters, then it's all bound into a book? I don't know the process of printing books.

From Wikipedia:

Ê is the 9th letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents /e/. In Vietnamese phonology, diacritics can be added to form five forms to represent five tones of ê:

Here's how it can be typed, might help? https://fontmeme.com/alt-codes-shortcut ... haracters/
Maybe it's a typo? I think details of the book, such as the date it was written and/or printed will help as well.

Here's Times New Roman VS Calibri. The hook is placed differently.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sat Mar 14, 2020 11:45 am

Macro_Cosmos wrote:I think details of the book, such as the date it was written and/or printed will help as well.

It's the "WINTER 2020" issue of the periodical "Cooking Light" (http://cookinglight.com).

Bottom of the title page says "PRINTED IN THE USA".

The book/magazine is only about 1/4" thick, soft cover, looks like glue binding with no stitching. Chapter 3 is not self-contained as printed; its first and last pages have reverse sides that belong to the surrounding chapters 2 and 4.

I looked for but did not find contact information for somebody on the magazine's editorial staff that I could ask.

--Rik

Macro_Cosmos · Post by **Macro_Cosmos** » Sun Mar 15, 2020 3:57 am

Ahh I see. It's a very modern print then. I was thinking if it's a book from the 80s or something, the matter would be a lot more complicated, was adobe PDF around back then?

I think we'd have an ok chance if we contact the authors and printing agency/company. They might be able to address this, or at least remove some theories from the list. Authors would know if they made an odd typo or not. If the most obvious is out of question, then it's likely some kind of error on the computational side (if that makes sense).