Saturday, May 30, 2009
"Jane Goodall, I sorry, Bigfoot not going to drunk-dial you again."
Oh my god, even Bigfoot is on twitter.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Also: Tennant's Hamlet on BBC2
Warm up the bittorrent client, everyone. The David Tennant / Patrick Stewart Hamlet is being filmed for BBC2.
This concludes your British entertainment news for the day.
This concludes your British entertainment news for the day.
....And we have the other new cast member!
The Doctor's new assistant is a British actress you've never heard of named Karen Gillan.
All is right with the world.
All is right with the world.
It's a TWIN PEAKS FRIDAY
Holy crap, y'all, DAVID LYNCH is on Twitter.
While you're gluing your mind back together, go ahead and break it again with the daily weather report, also from David Lynch.
Finally, coilhouse has some really snazzy behind the scene pictures from Twin Peaks.
While you're gluing your mind back together, go ahead and break it again with the daily weather report, also from David Lynch.
Finally, coilhouse has some really snazzy behind the scene pictures from Twin Peaks.
Eyes to the right...
Alert readers of this space will notice that The Fortress' other contributor also now has a Twitter feed, which I've added to the sidecar.
As an aside, did you know that Twitter's blogger widget doesn't support more than one twitter feed in the blog sidecar? Neither did I, until I had to spend the last 20 minutes rewriting their javascript.
As an aside, did you know that Twitter's blogger widget doesn't support more than one twitter feed in the blog sidecar? Neither did I, until I had to spend the last 20 minutes rewriting their javascript.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Wikipedia finally does a mobile verison
Via this article on /., it turns out Wikipedia has finally cooked out a version of the site optimized for mobile devices (ie, my iPhone). Looking forward to seeing if I can ditch all those 3rd party apps I keep using to get to wikipedia faster.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Eat Your Fruits and Veggies!
Here is a link to a local organic farm that will bring a huge variety of fresh produce to your door for about $2-$3 per pound. They are the best tasting fruits and veggies with the most convenient way to get your hands on them!
http://www.farmfreshtoyou.com/index.php
Enjoy!
Heidi :)
http://www.farmfreshtoyou.com/index.php
Enjoy!
Heidi :)
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Microsoft's ClearType Fonts
FONTS WEEK!
Microsoft is not a company to let an expensive-to-develop technology go to waste. While ClearType was present but optional in Windows XP, it's fully active in Vista - and running inside of both Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007 regardless of the rest of the operating system.
With this in mind, Microsoft did what any self-respecting pesudo-monoploy would do: it was time for some new fonts! And like that, the ClearType Font Collection was born. The idea was simple, and in many ways, genius - with ClearType now fully integrated into the OS' text display system, develop a new set of system fonts that take full advantage of the technology to look as good as possible on both the screen and the page.
This is the sort of behavior that earned Microsoft its reputation for evil ("What, they even want us to upgrade our fonts?") but in this case they didn't get all that much flack since the new fonts are gorgeous. And, in a moment of sanity, the whole batch of fonts come free with both the Powerpoint 2007 Viewer and the Office 2007 Compatability Pack. I don't intend to be playing any Powerpoint slide decks on my machine any time soon, but the viewer has become one of the first things I install on a new machine to get those nifty fonts.
I've nicknamed them the "C-type" fonts, since they cleverly all start with the letter "C":
Calibri
Cambria
Candara
Consolas
Constantia
Corbel
(If you have them installed, those links should be using the fonts in question. If not, wiki has examples for you.)
At the same time, Calibri became the new default font in Office, replacing Times New Roman in Word and Arial in everything else. Finally we're going to get a break from TNR being the font everyone uses for everything.
As far as the rest of the bath goes, I couldn't be happier. Consolas might be the best looking mono-spaced font I've ever seen, and I think Candara is just gorgeous - If I was in college still, I'm pretty sure Candara would become my standard essay font. As for the rest? To my (mostly untrained) eye, Constantia is a better Times New Roman /Georgia, and Corbel is a better Arial / Verdana. Calibri is just sharp - possibly the perfect default font. I'm not really sure where Cambria fits in, but it's apparently designed for displaying mathematical text as it includes all manner of extra fancy math symbols. (Possibly, this is Microsoft's first step towards going after TeX with Word.)
Microsoft is not a company to let an expensive-to-develop technology go to waste. While ClearType was present but optional in Windows XP, it's fully active in Vista - and running inside of both Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007 regardless of the rest of the operating system.
With this in mind, Microsoft did what any self-respecting pesudo-monoploy would do: it was time for some new fonts! And like that, the ClearType Font Collection was born. The idea was simple, and in many ways, genius - with ClearType now fully integrated into the OS' text display system, develop a new set of system fonts that take full advantage of the technology to look as good as possible on both the screen and the page.
This is the sort of behavior that earned Microsoft its reputation for evil ("What, they even want us to upgrade our fonts?") but in this case they didn't get all that much flack since the new fonts are gorgeous. And, in a moment of sanity, the whole batch of fonts come free with both the Powerpoint 2007 Viewer and the Office 2007 Compatability Pack. I don't intend to be playing any Powerpoint slide decks on my machine any time soon, but the viewer has become one of the first things I install on a new machine to get those nifty fonts.
I've nicknamed them the "C-type" fonts, since they cleverly all start with the letter "C":
Calibri
Cambria
Candara
Consolas
Constantia
Corbel
(If you have them installed, those links should be using the fonts in question. If not, wiki has examples for you.)
At the same time, Calibri became the new default font in Office, replacing Times New Roman in Word and Arial in everything else. Finally we're going to get a break from TNR being the font everyone uses for everything.
As far as the rest of the bath goes, I couldn't be happier. Consolas might be the best looking mono-spaced font I've ever seen, and I think Candara is just gorgeous - If I was in college still, I'm pretty sure Candara would become my standard essay font. As for the rest? To my (mostly untrained) eye, Constantia is a better Times New Roman /Georgia, and Corbel is a better Arial / Verdana. Calibri is just sharp - possibly the perfect default font. I'm not really sure where Cambria fits in, but it's apparently designed for displaying mathematical text as it includes all manner of extra fancy math symbols. (Possibly, this is Microsoft's first step towards going after TeX with Word.)
Friday, May 22, 2009
Oh, SNAP.
"It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more. "There's a special kind of "British Rude" that I'm a big fan of, mostly due to my misspent youth watching Monty Python. With that in mind, I immensely enjoyed Jeremy Clarkson's review of the new Honda Insight in The Times.
ClearType, or: Welcome to the State of the Art for the Year 2000
FONTS WEEK!
The moral of Fonts Week, if there is one, is that typography is really, really complicated.
For example, which do you optimize for: reading on the screen or reading on paper? Traditionally, of course, there was no contest - fonts needed to look good on paper, and nothing else. Even when computers started displaying real fonts on the screen in the late 80s, the focus was still on the page - so the mark of a "good" font display was how closely the text on the screen matched the way it was going to look on the page.
Take Times New Roman, for instance. TNR, that stock font for college essays everywhere, was originally commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931, and was their standard text font from then through the early 70s. While The Times itself doesn't use the font any longer, it's become a standard baseline for pretty much any print that needs to look good.
The problem is that it just doesn't look all that great on the screen. The issue is one of resolution - TNR (and most other fonts) are intended to look good at print resolution - 300 or 600 dpi. Computer displays top out, generally speaking, at about 96 dpi, which means that in a best case scenario you're seeing about 1/3 of the information in any given TNR letter.
A brief review, at this point, how computer displays work. A computer screen has a finine number of pixels arranged in a grid - each of which can be a single color at any given time. Since each pixel is a square, this is what gives computer displays that slightly blocky look - your standard XGA screen is 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels tall, which really isn't all that many. If you imagine the screen as a sheet of graph paper where you have to fill in a selection of squares to make an image, it's easy to see how you end up with jagged edges, since each block can be either on or off. The more pixels and the more colors you have reduce the problem, but this is still a fundamental aspect of how computers display images.
The first batch of technology to reduce this effect was anti-aliasing. Simply put, after something is drawn into the pixel grid, AA does additional passes to draw in fainter pixels around the jagged edges, making the image appear smoother.
The problem gets exacerbated with text, since text is teensy. Anti-aliasing needs a fair amount of space to work freely, and a single letter of text on the screen just doesn't have all that many pixlels. For example, depending on your settings, the letter i is probably only a pixel or two wide. As 2x2 pixels, there aren't a lot of ways to make the dot over the i look like anything but a tiny square.
One of the approaches was to build new fonts. As part of their Core Fonts for the Web, Microsoft introduced two new typefaces: Georgia and Verdana, which were intended to be replacements for Times New Roman and Arial, respectively, but optimized for viewing on the screen, and therefore cared more about how they parsed into the pixel grid then how they looked on the page. This is why the two of them are very easy to read, but are also tremendously boring to look at when printed out. Assuming you have all the right fonts installed, Georgia and Verdana should be a little clearer to read:
Then, when LCD screens came along, suddenly a cool new option presented itself: subpixel rendering. LCD screen don't work quite like the older CRT tubes - on an LCD, each pixel is actually three segments, one each for red, green, and blue. Witty programmers suddenly thought - hey, we can effectively get a times three increase in resolution for our anti-aliasing routines as long as we don't care all that much about what color the pixels around the edge are. The good news is that at the tiny sizes we're talking about, color really doesn't matter - the human eye just isn't that good. So, if taking a black letter and adding a red-black edge to it makes it look smoother, the eye just blends the colors together but still sees the shape.
As usual, this is the point where Microsoft and Apple started moving in totally different directions. Apple wrote their whole subpixel engine around making the fonts on the screen look as much like the designer wanted them to look as possible. Microsoft went the other way, and used their tech to jam the font characters into the pixel grid, fidelity to the designer be damned. Therefore, we end up with a world where Microsoft systems are easier to read on the screen but look different when printed out, and Apple systems look the same on the screen as on the page, at the cost of some readability on the screen. Joel "Joel On Software" Spolsky has an excellent article comparing the two approaches, complete with some Apple vs. MS graphics.
However, there's an extra wrinkle. Microsoft named their subpixel technology "ClearType" when they launched it in 2000 as part of the Microsoft Reader ebook platform. It later made it's way in to the OS itself as of Windows XP. However, while it's fully operational in Vista out of the box, it's turned off by default in Windows XP, despite being fully present. I just found this out myself, I had always assumed that ClearType was turned on and just didn't look very good on my XP machine. So here, if you're running XP on an LCD screen, try this experiment:
If you're anything like me, you've got a windows desktop full of icons. Crack open a Windows Explorer or My Computer window such that you have some text in that window and can still see the icon labels on the desktop. Right click on the desktop and choose properties. Go to Appearance, then click on Effects. In the resulting dialog box, there should be a pull-down menu under "Use the following method to smooth the edges of screen fonts". The selected option is probably "Standard". Change that to ClearType. Hit Okay until you're out of all the dialog boxes.
How much better does the screen look now? On my two machines the difference was pretty incredible. Turns out that feature has been in XP since day one, and I only just discovered it this week, eight years later. Dang.
But wait, there's more! Since ClearType is really just using a function of the way LCD screens work to do an elaborate optical illusion, there's a whole lot of ways to make it look BAD. With that in mind, Microsoft Typography released the ClearType Tuner PowerToy, which adds a bunch of ways to dial your ClearType settings in to your specific monitor. Check it out. Personally, I'm sold.
The moral of Fonts Week, if there is one, is that typography is really, really complicated.
For example, which do you optimize for: reading on the screen or reading on paper? Traditionally, of course, there was no contest - fonts needed to look good on paper, and nothing else. Even when computers started displaying real fonts on the screen in the late 80s, the focus was still on the page - so the mark of a "good" font display was how closely the text on the screen matched the way it was going to look on the page.
Take Times New Roman, for instance. TNR, that stock font for college essays everywhere, was originally commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931, and was their standard text font from then through the early 70s. While The Times itself doesn't use the font any longer, it's become a standard baseline for pretty much any print that needs to look good.
The problem is that it just doesn't look all that great on the screen. The issue is one of resolution - TNR (and most other fonts) are intended to look good at print resolution - 300 or 600 dpi. Computer displays top out, generally speaking, at about 96 dpi, which means that in a best case scenario you're seeing about 1/3 of the information in any given TNR letter.
A brief review, at this point, how computer displays work. A computer screen has a finine number of pixels arranged in a grid - each of which can be a single color at any given time. Since each pixel is a square, this is what gives computer displays that slightly blocky look - your standard XGA screen is 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels tall, which really isn't all that many. If you imagine the screen as a sheet of graph paper where you have to fill in a selection of squares to make an image, it's easy to see how you end up with jagged edges, since each block can be either on or off. The more pixels and the more colors you have reduce the problem, but this is still a fundamental aspect of how computers display images.
The first batch of technology to reduce this effect was anti-aliasing. Simply put, after something is drawn into the pixel grid, AA does additional passes to draw in fainter pixels around the jagged edges, making the image appear smoother.
The problem gets exacerbated with text, since text is teensy. Anti-aliasing needs a fair amount of space to work freely, and a single letter of text on the screen just doesn't have all that many pixlels. For example, depending on your settings, the letter i is probably only a pixel or two wide. As 2x2 pixels, there aren't a lot of ways to make the dot over the i look like anything but a tiny square.
One of the approaches was to build new fonts. As part of their Core Fonts for the Web, Microsoft introduced two new typefaces: Georgia and Verdana, which were intended to be replacements for Times New Roman and Arial, respectively, but optimized for viewing on the screen, and therefore cared more about how they parsed into the pixel grid then how they looked on the page. This is why the two of them are very easy to read, but are also tremendously boring to look at when printed out. Assuming you have all the right fonts installed, Georgia and Verdana should be a little clearer to read:
- This (should be) in Arial
- This (should be) in Verdana
- This (should be) in Times New Roman
- This (should be) in Georgia
Then, when LCD screens came along, suddenly a cool new option presented itself: subpixel rendering. LCD screen don't work quite like the older CRT tubes - on an LCD, each pixel is actually three segments, one each for red, green, and blue. Witty programmers suddenly thought - hey, we can effectively get a times three increase in resolution for our anti-aliasing routines as long as we don't care all that much about what color the pixels around the edge are. The good news is that at the tiny sizes we're talking about, color really doesn't matter - the human eye just isn't that good. So, if taking a black letter and adding a red-black edge to it makes it look smoother, the eye just blends the colors together but still sees the shape.
As usual, this is the point where Microsoft and Apple started moving in totally different directions. Apple wrote their whole subpixel engine around making the fonts on the screen look as much like the designer wanted them to look as possible. Microsoft went the other way, and used their tech to jam the font characters into the pixel grid, fidelity to the designer be damned. Therefore, we end up with a world where Microsoft systems are easier to read on the screen but look different when printed out, and Apple systems look the same on the screen as on the page, at the cost of some readability on the screen. Joel "Joel On Software" Spolsky has an excellent article comparing the two approaches, complete with some Apple vs. MS graphics.
However, there's an extra wrinkle. Microsoft named their subpixel technology "ClearType" when they launched it in 2000 as part of the Microsoft Reader ebook platform. It later made it's way in to the OS itself as of Windows XP. However, while it's fully operational in Vista out of the box, it's turned off by default in Windows XP, despite being fully present. I just found this out myself, I had always assumed that ClearType was turned on and just didn't look very good on my XP machine. So here, if you're running XP on an LCD screen, try this experiment:
If you're anything like me, you've got a windows desktop full of icons. Crack open a Windows Explorer or My Computer window such that you have some text in that window and can still see the icon labels on the desktop. Right click on the desktop and choose properties. Go to Appearance, then click on Effects. In the resulting dialog box, there should be a pull-down menu under "Use the following method to smooth the edges of screen fonts". The selected option is probably "Standard". Change that to ClearType. Hit Okay until you're out of all the dialog boxes.
How much better does the screen look now? On my two machines the difference was pretty incredible. Turns out that feature has been in XP since day one, and I only just discovered it this week, eight years later. Dang.
But wait, there's more! Since ClearType is really just using a function of the way LCD screens work to do an elaborate optical illusion, there's a whole lot of ways to make it look BAD. With that in mind, Microsoft Typography released the ClearType Tuner PowerToy, which adds a bunch of ways to dial your ClearType settings in to your specific monitor. Check it out. Personally, I'm sold.
More Words to Live By
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."-- John Rogers
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Pirate Economics
“Should a Captain be so saucy as to exceed Prescription at any time, why down with him! "
Someone has written a book about pirate economics called "The Invisible Hook." Not only do I want to high-five this individual for that title, but this review makes it sound fascinating.
Someone has written a book about pirate economics called "The Invisible Hook." Not only do I want to high-five this individual for that title, but this review makes it sound fascinating.
Comic Sans, maybe we should all be a little less rude
FONTS WEEK!
Comic Sans has pretty much become a punchline these days. Hating it is practically a bedrock of web culture at this point.
At this time, I feel a need to link to both Achewood and Dinosaur Comics. And, I suppose, BanComicSans.com.
For those of you just joining us in the font nerd carnival, it's not that Comic Sans is a bad font in its own right, it's just that it's used incorrectly 99% of the places you see it. Comic strip dialogue? Yes. Restaurant Menus? No thank you. And, thanks to the previously discussed Core Fonts initiative, every budding designer has a copy at hand.
So, where did the scourge of the font world come from? As with all good news / bad news in modern computing, the answer is: Microsoft.
A font designer working for Microsoft named Vincent Connare knocked the font together for a very specific purpose, for which it was more or less perfect. Somehow, it then got included in the Windows 95 core fonts much to the surprise and low-level dismay of everyone involved.
Connare reveals the secret history of the font on his website.
Also, be sure to read the official Comic Sans page over at Microsoft Typography.
Finally, the Snog Blog delivers an excellent interview with Connare about Comic Sans and the hoopla around it.
"If you love it, you really don't know much about typography and if you hate it you really don't know much about typography either and should get another hobby."
--Vincent Connare
Comic Sans has pretty much become a punchline these days. Hating it is practically a bedrock of web culture at this point.
At this time, I feel a need to link to both Achewood and Dinosaur Comics. And, I suppose, BanComicSans.com.
For those of you just joining us in the font nerd carnival, it's not that Comic Sans is a bad font in its own right, it's just that it's used incorrectly 99% of the places you see it. Comic strip dialogue? Yes. Restaurant Menus? No thank you. And, thanks to the previously discussed Core Fonts initiative, every budding designer has a copy at hand.
So, where did the scourge of the font world come from? As with all good news / bad news in modern computing, the answer is: Microsoft.
A font designer working for Microsoft named Vincent Connare knocked the font together for a very specific purpose, for which it was more or less perfect. Somehow, it then got included in the Windows 95 core fonts much to the surprise and low-level dismay of everyone involved.
Connare reveals the secret history of the font on his website.
Also, be sure to read the official Comic Sans page over at Microsoft Typography.
Finally, the Snog Blog delivers an excellent interview with Connare about Comic Sans and the hoopla around it.
Most Common Fonts Survey Results
FONTS WEEK!
codestyle.org presents us with the most commonly installed fonts based on their survey of "the Internets."
Looking at the top 40, two things strike me: first - I have almost all of these installed, which surprises me since I assumed that between me and Heidi we would have all of them, and second - what a tremendously boring collection of typefaces.
codestyle.org presents us with the most commonly installed fonts based on their survey of "the Internets."
Looking at the top 40, two things strike me: first - I have almost all of these installed, which surprises me since I assumed that between me and Heidi we would have all of them, and second - what a tremendously boring collection of typefaces.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Solving Problems like it's 1996 - Core Fonts for the Web
It's FONTS WEEK here at The Fortress! (Which is like Shark Week, just with fewer cages.)
The main theme of fonts week is that fonts are really complicated from a technology point of view. There's a whole rabbit-hole you can dive down to get fonts looking good. Not only do you need the letter glyphs themselves, you need a way to scale the characters up and down to various sizes, they need to look good on a screen and / or in print, and you need a way to handle all kinds of other micro-adjustments between characters.
For a long time, then, in the world of computers fonts were the domain of the printer itself, and your DOS-based computer (or early Apple, or UNIX machine, or what have you) would just tell the printer what font to use, and the printer would make it work - fueled by Adobe's excellent (but expensive) PostScript technology.
This all started to change in the early nineties when Apple, tired of paying out the nose for PostScript, came up with TrueType and licensed it to Microsoft - where it quickly became the naive way to handle fonts for both Windows and the Macintosh (Starting with versions 3.1 and System 7.)
Hand-waving away a lot of the technical details, this meant that fonts could now live in a font file on a computer, and the (then) new graphical displays could use the same files as the printers to show exactly what your document was going to look like when it was printed. At this point we got an explosion of "What You See is What You Get" word processors, with Word more or less leading the pack.
Suddenly the whole world goes font crazy, and we start knocking out fliers and newsletters that look like an explosion in a type foundry.
This all works great until the World Wide Web starts to go mainstream in 1995 or so. Because here's the catch - a computer can display pretty much any text in any font - as long as that font is installed on the computer in question. So, while the person writing a web page could specify any font they wanted for the text of their page, a person reading the page wouldn't see it like that unless they had the same font installed - and if they didn't, their browser would guess what font was the closest. And yes, that always looked terrible. (Sidebar: yes, this was one of the many reasons why all those geocities pages looked like they did.)
On top of all that, there was a legal problem - fonts are only licensed for use on one machine, technically, so if you used Helvetica, say, for your website, you couldn't just put your copy on the page to be downloaded. This was compounded by the fact that no one ever came up with a decent way to embed fonts in a website (thanks, largely, to the legal issues.)
So, it's 1996. The font thing on the web is clearly going to be a problem. Enter Microsoft, and their Core Fonts for the Web. The idea was simple - they took a batch of fonts they owned, and promised that those fonts would always be installed and available on all of their products, and they were willing to license these fonts for a very reasonable sum. Apple jumped at it, and the Core Fonts became the canonical fonts everyone used on the web.
It's a shame then, that they picked such sucky fonts.
The fonts in the set are:
Verdana and Georgia were among Microsoft's first few attempts at making a font that looks good on the screen as opposed to the page, so those are good calls. Times New Roman had already become the standard word-processor font, so that's a good call too. Courier? Sure, why not. But the rest? In my mind, this is when Arial finally took over from Helvetica for good. Webdings? Why? No really, why would anyone actually use webdings? Impact and Andale? Fairly pointless as near as I can see. These are the two I always forget are in the set - and I don't think anyone used either until Impact became the font of choice for LOLCats. Trebuchet - dull and ugly. And my goodness - why Comic Sans? Of all the "fun" fonts to make standard across all computers on the planet, why did it have to be COMIC SANS?
So, we end up with the classic Microsoft solution to a problem. Don't get me wrong - I think the idea was fantastic, and it worked great - every machine on the planet, more or less, has these fonts installed, and they are what the web looks like now, for better or worse.
But what a pedestrian set of choices. Why two monospace fonts? Either Andale or Courier is a fine choice, but both? Arial, Trebuchet and Verdana have the same problem - having more than one basic sans serif font is probably a good idea, but those three are so similar as to make the choice pointless. Verdana, for example, was designed explicitly as a replacement for Arial for use on the screen, as was Georgia for Times New Roman. If we're going to install 10 fonts on everybody's computer, why not 10 really different fonts, and remove all the duplicates? Finally: did anyone, ever, at any time, use webdings for something that isn't utterly irritating? (Adding insult to injury on that front, while writing this post I discovered that Firefox straight-up won't use webdings, regardless as to whether you have it installed or not. I see I'm not the only one with a low opinion of the font.)
Moving forward to 2002, Microsoft finally pulled the plug on the idea, citing frequent copyright violations as their excuse. Apple still licenses them for OSX, however, and most of them are still included with Windows and Office, so their ubiquity looks likely to remain for a while.
Still. What a missed opportunity. Although it presents us with a fun mind game: if you could choose, which 10 fonts would you install on everybody's computer?
The main theme of fonts week is that fonts are really complicated from a technology point of view. There's a whole rabbit-hole you can dive down to get fonts looking good. Not only do you need the letter glyphs themselves, you need a way to scale the characters up and down to various sizes, they need to look good on a screen and / or in print, and you need a way to handle all kinds of other micro-adjustments between characters.
For a long time, then, in the world of computers fonts were the domain of the printer itself, and your DOS-based computer (or early Apple, or UNIX machine, or what have you) would just tell the printer what font to use, and the printer would make it work - fueled by Adobe's excellent (but expensive) PostScript technology.
This all started to change in the early nineties when Apple, tired of paying out the nose for PostScript, came up with TrueType and licensed it to Microsoft - where it quickly became the naive way to handle fonts for both Windows and the Macintosh (Starting with versions 3.1 and System 7.)
Hand-waving away a lot of the technical details, this meant that fonts could now live in a font file on a computer, and the (then) new graphical displays could use the same files as the printers to show exactly what your document was going to look like when it was printed. At this point we got an explosion of "What You See is What You Get" word processors, with Word more or less leading the pack.
Suddenly the whole world goes font crazy, and we start knocking out fliers and newsletters that look like an explosion in a type foundry.
This all works great until the World Wide Web starts to go mainstream in 1995 or so. Because here's the catch - a computer can display pretty much any text in any font - as long as that font is installed on the computer in question. So, while the person writing a web page could specify any font they wanted for the text of their page, a person reading the page wouldn't see it like that unless they had the same font installed - and if they didn't, their browser would guess what font was the closest. And yes, that always looked terrible. (Sidebar: yes, this was one of the many reasons why all those geocities pages looked like they did.)
On top of all that, there was a legal problem - fonts are only licensed for use on one machine, technically, so if you used Helvetica, say, for your website, you couldn't just put your copy on the page to be downloaded. This was compounded by the fact that no one ever came up with a decent way to embed fonts in a website (thanks, largely, to the legal issues.)
So, it's 1996. The font thing on the web is clearly going to be a problem. Enter Microsoft, and their Core Fonts for the Web. The idea was simple - they took a batch of fonts they owned, and promised that those fonts would always be installed and available on all of their products, and they were willing to license these fonts for a very reasonable sum. Apple jumped at it, and the Core Fonts became the canonical fonts everyone used on the web.
It's a shame then, that they picked such sucky fonts.
The fonts in the set are:
- Andale Mono
- Arial
- Comic Sans MS
- Courier New
- Georgia
- Impact
- Times New Roman
- Trebuchet MS
- Verdana
- Webdings (Webdings)
Verdana and Georgia were among Microsoft's first few attempts at making a font that looks good on the screen as opposed to the page, so those are good calls. Times New Roman had already become the standard word-processor font, so that's a good call too. Courier? Sure, why not. But the rest? In my mind, this is when Arial finally took over from Helvetica for good. Webdings? Why? No really, why would anyone actually use webdings? Impact and Andale? Fairly pointless as near as I can see. These are the two I always forget are in the set - and I don't think anyone used either until Impact became the font of choice for LOLCats. Trebuchet - dull and ugly. And my goodness - why Comic Sans? Of all the "fun" fonts to make standard across all computers on the planet, why did it have to be COMIC SANS?
So, we end up with the classic Microsoft solution to a problem. Don't get me wrong - I think the idea was fantastic, and it worked great - every machine on the planet, more or less, has these fonts installed, and they are what the web looks like now, for better or worse.
But what a pedestrian set of choices. Why two monospace fonts? Either Andale or Courier is a fine choice, but both? Arial, Trebuchet and Verdana have the same problem - having more than one basic sans serif font is probably a good idea, but those three are so similar as to make the choice pointless. Verdana, for example, was designed explicitly as a replacement for Arial for use on the screen, as was Georgia for Times New Roman. If we're going to install 10 fonts on everybody's computer, why not 10 really different fonts, and remove all the duplicates? Finally: did anyone, ever, at any time, use webdings for something that isn't utterly irritating? (Adding insult to injury on that front, while writing this post I discovered that Firefox straight-up won't use webdings, regardless as to whether you have it installed or not. I see I'm not the only one with a low opinion of the font.)
Moving forward to 2002, Microsoft finally pulled the plug on the idea, citing frequent copyright violations as their excuse. Apple still licenses them for OSX, however, and most of them are still included with Windows and Office, so their ubiquity looks likely to remain for a while.
Still. What a missed opportunity. Although it presents us with a fun mind game: if you could choose, which 10 fonts would you install on everybody's computer?
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
This tweet is my new words to live by
"I'm tired of the word "content" as a descriptor for what I produce (video, blog posts). Henceforth, I vow to instead use the term "fixins.""
-Xeni Jardin
Me too. From here on out, it's "FIXINS"
-Xeni Jardin
Me too. From here on out, it's "FIXINS"
Monday, May 18, 2009
"All computer geeks tend to fall in love with typography at some point in their careers"
We tend to be font nerds around the Fortress. Heidi as a Graphic Designer, of course, is paid to be a font nerd. I just come by mine for no good reason.
There's some real truth in the quote in the title - there's something about typography that really appeals to Computer Programmers where they live. Personally, I think it's in part because typography is arguably a mess of really complex algorithms - the kind that programmers think are really fun to untangle. That, and the fact that programmers also tend to be book nerds as well, and it doesn't take much of a book problem before you start to really notice how books are put together.
In any case, the star exhibit of this particular post is an article from CodingHorror from a year and a half ago (which would have gone on the blog then - if it had existed then,) - Typography: Where Engineers and Designers Meet. The article is inspired by the 40th anniversary of Helvetica, and is a pretty fascinating breakdown of Helvetica and computer fonts. However, as usual for Codign Horror entries, the real meat are the links. If you only follow one, be sure to read Mark Simonson's "The Scourge of Arial", a fantastic primer on the shady past of Arial, everyone's favorite least favorite font. Also a must read is linked to on that same page, "How to Spot Arial," which blew my mind the first time I read it.
There's some real truth in the quote in the title - there's something about typography that really appeals to Computer Programmers where they live. Personally, I think it's in part because typography is arguably a mess of really complex algorithms - the kind that programmers think are really fun to untangle. That, and the fact that programmers also tend to be book nerds as well, and it doesn't take much of a book problem before you start to really notice how books are put together.
In any case, the star exhibit of this particular post is an article from CodingHorror from a year and a half ago (which would have gone on the blog then - if it had existed then,) - Typography: Where Engineers and Designers Meet. The article is inspired by the 40th anniversary of Helvetica, and is a pretty fascinating breakdown of Helvetica and computer fonts. However, as usual for Codign Horror entries, the real meat are the links. If you only follow one, be sure to read Mark Simonson's "The Scourge of Arial", a fantastic primer on the shady past of Arial, everyone's favorite least favorite font. Also a must read is linked to on that same page, "How to Spot Arial," which blew my mind the first time I read it.
Luis jr, back from beyond
In December of 2007, my favorite restaurant of all time - Luis Jr's - closed its doors, the building it was renting from having been bought by the Church of Scientology for conversion to some kind of Xenu observation platform.
The rumor was that they had to pay Luis Jr a significant amount of money to get them to leave their lease early.
I struck up a conversation with Luis Jr himself on the restaurant's last day, and he said they were expecting to reopen in a new location "soon."
A year and a half slowly rolled by.
And then - this.
Hiking past the Sutter Square Galleria at 2901 K Street, we find this sign gleaming at us through the window.
According to their answering machine, they're targeting an august '09 opening.
Thank goodness. The long dark may be over.
The rumor was that they had to pay Luis Jr a significant amount of money to get them to leave their lease early.
I struck up a conversation with Luis Jr himself on the restaurant's last day, and he said they were expecting to reopen in a new location "soon."
A year and a half slowly rolled by.
And then - this.
Hiking past the Sutter Square Galleria at 2901 K Street, we find this sign gleaming at us through the window.
According to their answering machine, they're targeting an august '09 opening.
Thank goodness. The long dark may be over.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
graphjam!
Good lord, how have I never heard of GraphJam.com until just now?
The basics: it's a website full of funny charts. The catch: REALLY funny charts.Some examples:
Bono.
Amount I'll be Watching You Vs. Time of Day.
A breakdown of Sir Mix-a-Lot's Tastes.
Except for THIS ONE.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Another Link roll-call
Either the internet has really been cooking the last few days, or I'm more easily amused than normal:
Via the usual set of BoingBoing links:
Also:
This comic strip sums up my entire lifestyle.
And this gentleman walks the thin line between Genius and Paralyzed.
Finally: It's MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS.
Via the usual set of BoingBoing links:
- Retro-future designs are way too cool.
- GM's Stop Motion proto-lego people explain how the economy works in 1939, at exactly the wrong level of detail.
- Jesse Ventura claims that given a waterboard and an hour of time, he could make Dick Cheney confess to the Sharon Tate murders. (As a side note, how did we end up in a place where we need a former wrestler known as "the body" to provide moral commentary on torture?)
Also:
This comic strip sums up my entire lifestyle.
And this gentleman walks the thin line between Genius and Paralyzed.
Finally: It's MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Well, this might get interesting.
Well, they found a bunch of damage to the Space Shuttle. It'll probably all turn out okay, but let's keep our fingers crossed.
Warren Ellis does a great job of summing up one of the big side issues here: namely, the Shuttle actually isn't sophisticated enough to get from the Hubble to the Space Station. Ouch.
Star Trek: Capsule Review
Liked it. A lot.
Stealing a line from Wil Wheaton, if all reboots were done this well, geeks wouldn't respond to reboots with the venom that they do.
For an old-school "lapsed catholic" Trekkie like myself, it was really a kick to see Trek given an actual A-List treatment (and budget).
My only real complaint about the movie was that it has, possibly, the worst astrophysics of any science fiction movie I've ever seen.
Also, it needed a Wil Wheaton cameo.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Coming Attractions - some history
As previously discussed in this space, one of my all time favorite websites, Corona's Coming Attractions, has risen from the grave.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Complexity - it's complex
Steve Yegge writes a truly excellent post on how things that only look a little tricky can actually be borderline impossibly complex. One of the examples he uses is legalizing marijuana, where he points out that just "making it legal" is actually a huge list of "well, what about..." type questions that no one ever has an answer to.
The point is that complex systems (like the legal system, or a computer system) are just that - complex.
Much ink has been spilled the last 50 years about the differences between "engineers" and "suits". I think the main difference, and the one that matters most of the time, is that the "engineers" have been trained to intuit this list of follow-up questions more or less right away. The "Suits" haven't.
D&D4 Test Drive
There's room for all kinds of analysis here, but I'm going to hold off on that until I come up with some.
The short version then, is that Hasbro has put the D&D4 quick start rules and the first adventure module they did up on their website as a free download. I suspect this means that sales aren't quite what they were hoping for.
Its not a bad module, a little generic, but I don't (totally) regret having bought it for actual money last summer.
Worth a look, however, is the demo version of the character builder. That's an impressive piece of software.
Links Spring Cleaning
Star Wars Meets McGyver!
Penn & Teller on the Neuroscience of Magic.
What with the auction of Neverland Ranch, someone went and took pictures of some the best stuff. Man, MJ is one crazy, crazy dude.
Holy crap, someone wrote an interpreter for the old Sierra AGI engine - IN JAVASCRIPT. Wanna play Space Quest I in a browser?
Sure, my iPhone and Hipster PDA are cool and all, but I really think I'm going to have to start carrying some Field Notes around.
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