Topic: Feature proposal: Adding cards to inventory, "meta" languages + fBB

Hei,
I am a new user who has just entered his first 1000 cards into the inventory. I find the deckbox-interface to be very smooth and effective to use - great work! The following small enhancements I'd still find useful:

Adding a card to inventory: selecting language: new option "Asian"
- I am not able to tell a difference between one Asian language from another. It would be useful to have a generic language "Asian" to indicate that it is some of the Asian languages. Currently I am erroneously marking them all as Japanese.

Adding a card to inventory: selecting language: new option "European"
- As above for "Asian" languages, but a generic term for European (non-English) languages one could use when not knowing what language the card exactly is.

Adding a card to inventory: selecting additional characteristics: new option "black bordered" (or foreign black bordered, "FBB")
- I have some cards from foreign sets, for example from some Asian Chronicles set, in which the cards have been printed with black borders (unlike in the original English set). It would add value to be able to indicate this is some standard way.

Thank you for the nice site!
Antti

Re: Feature proposal: Adding cards to inventory, "meta" languages + fBB

It sounds like it might be a good idea to create a visual guide for yourself. When I first started, I identified a few card languages I had on-hand and kept them nearby any time I needed to compare an unknown card.

The Asian languages are easy to tell apart. Here are three (I combined Chinese/Simplified Chinese) Giant Spiders:
http://i.imgur.com/YoFZiJD.png

Notice the forms and shapes of the characters? Chinese/Simplified Chinese has large, block-like characters, with punctuation centered vertically in the line. Japanese uses much smaller characters, by comparison, and you'll often see small characters above the main characters in the card name (I believe these are called "furigana" and are a pronunciation aid). Those furigana are a dead giveaway that the card is Japanese. Korean characters look different, almost simplified and more geometric.

Once we get into the euro languages and Brazilian Portuguese, it gets a little tougher as they all use the same latin characters. Here, you have to look for other indicators:
http://i.imgur.com/8zIxMm8.png

In German, you'll see things like "ü" (those dots above the letter are called umlauts) and "ß" and the open quotation mark will be on the bottom of the text line (see the flavor text). In French, they use a lot of "é" and "d'" and the quotation marks are « ». Italian can look really similar to french, but you'll see stuff like "è" (notice that the diacritic mark is leaning toward the left, unlike in french), and Italian uses the same quotation marks as english. Portuguese and Spanish are really similar, but Portuguese will typically capitalize the first letters of each word in the card's name - like French, Spanish does not in most cases. Portuguese Spanish also uses "ñ" where Portuguese will use "nh".

And then we have Russian. No explanation needed. Just look for the cyrillic characters.
http://i.imgur.com/aiNdo5W.jpg

Once you get the hang of spotting the giveaways, it becomes really easy to recognize printed languages.

Last edited by ReliquaryTower (2016-02-17 13:56:06)