Nathan Bransford - The Forums

I'm hoping someone out there has had some experience with this. My MS includes occasional bits of "text" from another alphabet. In my case it's a made up language, although the problem might be the same even if it weren't. I'm just wondering how I should format it for sending it out. I've been reading up on the Novel Standard Manuscript Format, but I haven't found anything about this particular circumstance, so I don't know what's recommended. Should I just stick it in like normal, or opt for a place-holder, or something else entirely?
Thanks!

Are you wondering about special characters in your language (such as tildes, omegas, or other non-Latin alphabet letters)? If so, here's a bit of the section regarding special characters from my Chicago Manual of Style:

Foreign words, phrases, or titles that occur in an English-language work must include special characters that appear in the original language. Those languages that use the Latin alphabet may include letter with accents (diacritical marks), ligatures, and, in some cases, alphabetical forms that do not normally occur in English. Many authors will have access to Unicode-compliant software and will therefore be able to reproduce each of these characters without the addition of any specialized fonts. Authors should nonetheless supply a list of special characters used within a manuscript to ensure the correct conversion to a particular font required for publication...

Even if that doesn't answer your question, I'd check the CMS anyways. They're kind of the definitive guide to manuscript format and editing and they have tons of info on how to do foreign languages. My 16th edition has at least three sections on it that I found in a cursory glance through the table of contents.

The question isn't about special characters, but made up ones. I created a new language and an alphabet to go with it. So technically they're images, but I currently have them inserted in the text like letters, since that's what they are. Does that make sense? I just don't know if it would be a big no-no to include something potentially distracting like that in my MS when the rest of the formatting is so geared towards simple uniformity.

Oh, my. Used to be if special text was wanted for publication it meant using engravings or special woodcuts. The engravings and woodcuts rarely were comparable to lead matrices' crisp and consistent appearance properties. And very expensive and frustating and time consuming to use. Later, 20th century photgraphically created work arounds generally improved the situation. Computer aided publishing made using special text accessible for average skill levels, like you have using graphical representations. However, In general, the principle is if it can't be set in lead from a standard typecase or typewriter, it didn't happen. Nowadays, it might be done if the narrative justifies the many hassles of doing it.

A cross platform and cross aplication work around today is to design a typeface and use it as such. Then embed it within a PDF file of the manuscript for circulation. The typeface design and implementation learning curve is precipitously steep though. And costly to have done.