French vocabulary in Encore Tricolore: do pupils have a chance?

British learners acquire very little vocabulary in their foreign languages,compared to pupils elsewhere in Europe, particularly learners of English as aforeign language. Could the materials used for teaching help explain thisdifference? An analysis of the vocabulary loading of a textbook for French as aforeign language commonly used in Britain, Encore Tricolore (Mascie-Taylor andHonnor, 2001, Cheltenham, UK, Nelson Thornes), was carried out with thisquestion in mind. An analysis of the vocabulary suggests that it is not introducedand practised in a way that is conducive to building a sufficiently large vocabularyto reach level B1 of the Common European Framework of Reference forLanguages (CEFR)

Simplicity in Visual Representation: A Semiotic Approach

Simplicity, as an ideal in the design of visual representations, has not received systematic attention. High-level guidelines are too general, and low-level guidelines too ad hoc, too numerous, and too often incompatible, to serve in a particular design situation. This paper reviews notions of visual simplicity in the literature within the analytical framework provided by Charles Morris' communication model, specifically, his trichotomy of communication levels—the syntactic, the semantic, and the pragmatic. Simplicity is ultimate ly shown to entail the adjudication of incompatibilities both within, and between, levels.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68281/2/10.1177_105065198700100103.pd

Learning A Stroke‐Based Representation for Fonts

Designing fonts and typefaces is a difficult process for both beginner and expert typographers. Existing workflows require the designer to create every glyph, while adhering to many loosely defined design suggestions to achieve an aesthetically appealing and coherent character set. This process can be significantly simplified by exploiting the similar structure character glyphs present across different fonts and the shared stylistic elements within the same font. To capture these correlations, we propose learning a stroke‐based font representation from a collection of existing typefaces. To enable this, we develop a stroke‐based geometric model for glyphs, a fitting procedure to reparametrize arbitrary fonts to our representation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model through a manifold learning technique that estimates a low‐dimensional font space. Our representation captures a wide range of everyday fonts with topological variations and naturally handles discrete and continuous variations, such as presence and absence of stylistic elements as well as slants and weights. We show that our learned representation can be used for iteratively improving fit quality, as well as exploratory style applications such as completing a font from a subset of observed glyphs, interpolating or adding and removing stylistic elements in existing fonts