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Another hour upon the stage

Inasmuch as this site has been hacked then consequently disabled multiple times over the last two years, I’ve finally done something about it so that, hopefully, the site can now stay up.

I have managed to lose the graphics, the encoding of some of the old posts is messed up, and the default theme is downright ugly, but each of those is fixable. So join me as I strut and fret for another hour upon the stage.

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Optical letter spacing

Inasmuch as “Optical letter spacing for new printing systems” by David Kindersley (London: The Wynkyn de Worde Society, 1976, 2nd revised edition) was described as a significant book by the website from where I bought it, I was disappointed that, for all its significance, it reports only inconclusive, intermediate results of experiments on determining optical letter spacing. I was surprised, therefore, to see “but a method of proportionate letter-spacing by computer has been explained by David Kindersley” in “Methods of Book Design” (3rd Edition, Yale University Press, 1983) by Hugh Williamson. Maybe there’s something in it that others can see but I can’t.

Towards the end, it says “I would like to say that there has never been a moment like today where perfect spacing was more possible.” That statement from the second edition has probably been true for every year since the first, 1966 edition. However, we have computing power today that was undreamed of in either 1966 or 1976, so you’d think that by now we would have moved from optical letter spacing being ‘more possible’ to it being practical everywhere.

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Type can be an aesthetic delight

Inasmuch as the “Type” in the opening sentence of The Relationship between Type and Illustration by A. P. Tedesco illustrates what the text is saying, I was quite taken by it:

Type alone when used properly with correct sizes, proper leading and proportioned well on the page and carefully printed, can be an aesthetic delight, because of its beauty, color and harmony. The typographer can embellish type with many available type borders and typographic ornaments which add a decorative touch to the printed page.

It also illustrates a use of initial capitals (to use the term very loosely, since it’s an initial word) that you can’t achieve with either XSL-FO or CSS. You could do it manually with XSL-FO by using side floats to push text out of the way of the initial “Type”, and even creating that would need a few iterations if you’re going to correctly optically align the stem of the “T” with the left edge of the text block.

You could, of course, argue that the aesthetics would have been better if the “Type” was slightly smaller so that the bottom of the descenders on “yp” aligns with the baseline of the third text line. However, we’ll never know whether the “Type” is the size it is because that was the best size available or if, for the sake of aesthetics, they pushed the size of the “Type” to the maximum to minimize the white-space between “Type” and the “alone” on the first line.

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AH Formatter MathML fonts on Linux

Inasmuch as AH Formatter supports MathML 3.0 but on Linux ships with a minimal font-config.xml file, if you are formatting non-trivial MathML on Linux, then you’ll probably need to add some mathematical fonts to your font-config.xml.

identity-matrixIf x2y2 counts as trivial because you could do it with “ordinary” fonts, then non-trivial would include anything requiring “stretchy” characters, such as the identity matrix example from the MathML 3.0 spec that is shown on the right rendered without and with mathematical fonts. AH Formatter on Linux uses the STIX fonts by default, so the simplest way to get your MathML rendering correctly is to make sure that the STIX fonts are installed and that AH Formatter will use them. Continue reading “AH Formatter MathML fonts on Linux”