Roman Numerals story

[kumo]

Project: https://github.com/kumo/NaNoGenMo-2015 Novel: https://github.com/kumo/NaNoGenMo-2015/blob/master/RomanBook.txt and https://github.com/kumo/NaNoGenMo-2015/blob/master/RomanBook80.txt (hard wrapped) PDF: https://github.com/kumo/NaNoGenMo-2015/blob/master/RomanBook.pdf Code: https://github.com/kumo/NaNoGenMo-2015/blob/master/RomanBook.swift

I wanted to do a choose your own adventure game, but that will wait until next time. Here is book containing Roman Numerals from 1 to 50,000 instead. The numbers are printed in order, but they are hopefully shaped into normal looking sentences and speech.

[kumo]

Ok, so this month is too busy for a choose your own adventure style book unfortunately, so I'm going to write a story using Roman Numerals, something like: "I, II III IV, V VI VII, VIII IX X."

[MichaelPaulukonis]

It often comes down to pruning our plans.

[kumo]

Ok. I am going to be sketching out my idea in Swift, so code can be found in this gist

[kumo]

I have sketched out some Swift code that makes different types of sentences and combines them in paragraphs. This is an example of one chapter:

Text can be found here: https://gist.github.com/kumo/8578cff5b7a37a5ecef9

[hugovk]

I like that it's putting punctuation and paragraphs and things in.

I did something with Roman numerals mixed with Finnish numbers last year, but just spat them out without formatting.

Another way to make nonsense output look meaningful is to take some existing input text -- pluck one out of Project Gutenberg -- and keep all the formatting and punctuation and so on, but replace all the words with your own input. (Here's an example with meows.)

[kumo]

The paragraph formatting seems to work properly, but I will probably try and sort out the correct lower/upper casing.

That Finnish one looks interesting and the meow one too. Was the formatting done by hand?

Perhaps next year I will make a redact generator with Roman Numerals

[kumo]

I am playing around with the lower/upper casing and it appears to work properly, but now I have to decide if the PDF version uses smallcaps or not.

Lower case version:

Smallcaps version:

I'll probably keep the lowercase version though since it has a more irregular appearance.

[zachwhalen]

I really like this.

[hugovk]

That Finnish one looks interesting and the meow one too. Was the formatting done by hand?

The Finnish one just has justified alignment.

The meow retains the formatting and punctuation of the input text, because each meow is the same length as in input word. So "shop" -> "meow", "house" -> "meoow", "the" -> "mew" etc.

[kumo]

Just for fun, the Rick Astley version:

[kumo]

And finally, the Italian version:

[kumo]

Rick's Book could be fine, but the Italian one requires different formatting for the quotations, so I will leave it at that.