Interesting Stuff

I’ve been corresponding with Dario Taraborelli and Will Robertson, and we have concluded a couple things about LaTeX and alternative glyphs for ligatures: Don’t bother reading behind this cut if you don’t use LaTeX →

A wandering tale of 15th century manuscripts and 20th century typesetting →

Get XeTeX on your box and tell me what you think of TeXing with the font Zapfino (which has been installed on every Mac). My first impression, looking round the Tubes, is that it’s gorgeous, with its swashes and alternatives for every character. However, it appears to need a bunch of extra macros, and it might be problematic understanding everything. I wish that I could try this out myself, except Zapfino is prohibitively costly just to mess around a bit. So anyone who has it without shelling out a dime, if you could give me your opinion I’d appreciate it much. I guess I ought to simply buy a Mac (despite the cost) because I’ve wanted one for ages and they look so very nice.

It’s worth noting that China has frozen Korean money transfers in protest over North Korea’s recent missile tests. I’m a bit surprised that China is willing to take such a strong action against what I thought was a close ally.

The more interesting news is that more chinks in the Bush administration’s monolithic confidence over Iraq are beginning to emerge. October, despite the observance of Ramadan, is already the most deadly month in Iraq for US troops since April. Most importantly, American diplomat Alberto Fernandez told al-Jazeera that the US acted with “arrogance and stupidity” in Iraq, and is now in a nigh unwinnable position. He was later forced to retract his position. The White House seems to be claiming that his statement was a mistranslation, despite the fact that Fernandez is fluent in Arabic (and presumably English, too).

Finally, I give you a history of Arial and Helvetica fonts, including a reason to like Helvetica and dislike Arial (Helvetica:Arial::Java:Javascript, one might say). I also include a guide to spotting the differences between the two. This was brought to my attention on the tex_latex community. I feel weird saying this, but it’s kinda fun being a typesetting snob and noticing the papers that lack ligatures and do paragraph/page spacing wrong.

Yes, I’m a big computer nerd. Feel free to skip this post if you’re not interested in (La)TeX.
The TeXbook is incredibly neat! →