http://understandinglimited.com Design & Computers Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:41:55 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en TUG2008, Cork, Ireland Dave Crossland dave@lab6.com Introduction: Dave is an international public speaker on software freedom and fonts, he runs a small business doing type design, information design and free software consultancy projects, and is a committee member of UKTUG. He' is currently studying the Masters programme in typeface Design at the University of Reading, and ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/07/24/why-metafont-didnt-catch-on/ These are rough notes from a public event, and any errors or stupidity should be attributed to me and my poor note taking; I hope these notes are useful despite their obvious flaws, and everything should be double checked :) Kamaelia is an awesome framework and doesn't get anywhere near enough ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/07/14/kamaelia-at-mashed/ These are rough notes from a public event, and any errors or stupidity should be attributed to me and my poor note taking; I didn't get much sleep last night since my talk at the event was at 09:30 this morning, and I was just traveling in France to research ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/07/11/ghm-2008/ Richard Stallman got published by BBC News, writing about Bill Gates' final retirement from Microsoft. Sadly the BBC continues to require proprietary software to access its services. http://understandinglimited.com/2008/07/04/rms-gates/ Pippin scares me; a recent blog post shows how Clutter is storming ahead - and a screencast shows it off nicely :-) (ogg download) http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/26/clutter-storming-ahead/ Inkscape's capacity as a SVG Font Editor - and moreover, a typeface design tool - is gathering steam :-) I didn't propose adding any special font support to Inkscape, just adding a few things to the UI to enable people to draw typefaces, which is a different task to developing production ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/23/inkforge-proceeds/ George Williams posted on the FontForge mailing list today: the cvs tree contains little icons in the menus. I'm not the greatest icon designer. If anyone would like to redo them so they are nicer that would be great. There is one unexpected caveat: FontForge doesn't handle alpha channels, so all ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/18/fontforge-icons/ Hadn't heard about Pat Tillman before; I wonder if there have been any UK equivalents that haven't gone awry (from an iwar perspective). (Via FTW 2008 update) http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/17/pat-tillman/ I'm annoyed to see Gatto's new book fall victim to "open source" propaganda, but look forward to its release :-) http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/13/gatto-open-source/ Kucinich is trying again to impeach Bush, and his "Articles of Impeachment" is heavy reading: Fraud - A Halliburton manager was indicted for 'major fraud against the United States' for allegedly billing more than $5.5 billion for work that should have cost only $685,000 in exchange for a $1 million kickback ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/13/impreach-bush-agai/ Glad to see other people working to make Affero GPL webapps a reality. http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/11/clipperz-affero/ More Spiro love from Andy: (SVG source here) Just the node alignment stuff in Inkscape is awesome - already advanced past AI and FontLab's node alignment tools - which Andy says is thanks to Mike Wybrow's adaptagram code. It seems the point of inflection for Inkscape's feature set is becoming very soon now, ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/10/inspirod-2/ Dario Taraborelli has an excellent LaTeX page that showcases the advanced typography that TeX is capable of (although he is very Mac OS X-centric and promotes proprietary fonts, sadly) and even has a page about typesetting a CV which I used to make my latest CV. http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/09/latex-cv/ I hope I can inspire people to patch Inkscape to make it suitable for drawing type :-) SVG Fonts isn’t supported much anywhere, but Chris Lilley’s talk at LGM2008 has got me thinking :-) Could Inkscape become an SVG Font Editor? Designing type involves working at four scales: designing individual letters ("drawing letters") designing letters ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/09/proposing-inkforge/ Spiro has now been directly integrated into Inkscape! Sadly the easiest way to see this in action is via the Windows pre-release version (You'll need 7zip to open that zip file :-) By "direct integration" I mean that using the normal drawing tools, both freehand and bez-pen, there is a "spiro" mode ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/09/inkspiro-here/ The TUG2008 Programme is now online and I appear to be at the top. Here's my abstract PDF and of particular note are Jonathan Fine's LaTeX3 talk, Dan Rhatigan's talk about mathematical fonts, and Jonathan Kew's TeXWorks talk - UKTUG funded Jonathan to develop this program :-) - and also ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/04/up-tug2008/ A British guy got turfed off a plane for wearing... a Transformers T Shirt? Go through security, get pulled to the side. I'm wearing a French Connection Transformers t-shirt. Bloke starts joking with me is that Megatron. Then he explains that since Megatron is holding a gun, I'm not allowed to fly. WTF? It's ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/03/flying-gun/ Ben Griffiths posted on the Open Rights Group list this little story about why DRM is evil: "I want to share a DRM story. I was in Curry's in Plymouth a couple of weeks ago. A man was arguing loudly with one of the staff, his ten-year old daughter in tears at his side. ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/03/drm-makes-girl-cry/ The "functional works" issue has come up on the BLAG list regarding "soundfonts." Here's a fuller version of my post there: Its important to start this discussion by framing it properly: this is about social policy, not technical detail. Most people are not used to thinking about issues of social policy, ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/03/soundfonts/ Barry Schwartz suggested on the fontforge-devel list that "it would be useful to me to be able to put a bitmap image in a background layer of the metrics window." George Williams asked, "Can you explain why this is worth the work? Why do you want an image there, that ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/06/02/reviving-metrics/ Andy Fitzsimon is cooking up a great LGM4 website - but damn, Singapore is a long way away... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/05/28/lgm4-ahoy/ Jim Gettys made a great post today on the SugarLabs mailing list about the problems with funding community projects: I've seen projects *die* from having centrally funded development staff conflated with project management and governance. This was the X consortium model (though it made other mistakes too). The scars are on my ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/05/28/funding-communities/ The UK is now arresting people for downloading "illegal documents" - from a well known terrorist organisation, the US government. This is via Richard's blog: [The UK state is] announcing their intention to imprison people for what they read. These tyrants are the real threat. Britons, don't let the tyrants distract ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/05/27/illegal-docs/ Peter Nermander recently commented on the Scribus mailing list: "I wish fonts would be licensed the same way for example photographs." I disagree strongly about this. Fonts are functional software, and photos are typically decorative artwork, so they are not similar and ought not be treated similarly. Fonts ought to be ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/05/25/why-free-fonts/ George Williams explains why a TrueType font cannot have a 1-1 relation to a SFD file: FontForge is a font editor, it is designed to change things, not leave them the same. If you wish exact copying I suggest you use "cp" it will do the job nicely. Differences in the ... http://understandinglimited.com/2008/05/25/font-121/