Typography

Modern operating systems understand Unicode internally, but font support for Unicode is spotty. For an example of the problems this can cause, take a look at these screen shots of how the same Twitter message appears differently depending on what program is used to read it.

No font can display all Unicode characters. According to Wikipedia

… it would be impossible to create such a font in any common font format, as Unicode includes over 100,000 characters, while no widely-used font format supports more than 65,535 glyphs.

However, the biggest problem isn’t the number of characters a font can display. Most Unicode characters are quite rare. About 30,000 characters are enough to display the vast majority of characters in use in all the world’s languages as well as a generous selection of symbols. However Unicode fonts vary greatly in their support even for the more commonly used ranges of characters. See this comparison chart. The only range completely covered by all Unicode fonts in the chart is the 128 characters of Latin Extended-A.

Unifont supports all printable characters in the basic multilingual plane, characters U+0000 through U+FFFF. This includes the 30,000 characters mentioned above plus many more. Unifont isn’t pretty, but it’s complete. As far as I know, it’s the only font that covers the characters below U+FFFF.

Related posts:

Why Unicode is subtle

Entering Unicode characters in Windows, Linux

Consolas is my favorite monospace font. It’s a good programmer’s font because it exaggerates the differences between some characters that may easily be confused. It ships with Visual Studio and with many other Microsoft products. See this post for examples.

I recently found out about Inconsolata, a free font similar to Consolas. Inconsolata is part of the OFL font collection from SIL International.

Another interesting font from SIL is Andika, mentioned previously here. The Andika home page describes this font as follows.

Andika is a sans serif, Unicode-compliant font designed especially for literacy use, taking into account the needs of beginning readers. The focus is on clear, easy-to-perceive letterforms that will not be readily confused with one another.

Related posts:

Better R console fonts
Adding fonts to the PowerShell console
Comic Sans and dyslexia

This post explains how to typeset multi-part definitions in LaTeX.

The absolute value function is a simple example of a two-part definition.

The Möbius function is a more complicated example of a three-part definition.

Here’s how you could write LaTeX for the absolute value definition.

|x| =
\left\{
	\begin{array}{ll}
		x  & \mbox{if } x \geq 0 \\
		-x & \mbox{if } x < 0
	\end{array}
\right.

The right-hand side of the equation is an array with an opening brace sized to fit on the left. Braces are special characters and so the opening brace needs to be escaped with a backslash. LaTeX requires a \right for every \left but the dot in \right. says to make the matching container on the right side empty.

Since this pattern comes up fairly often, it’s handy to have a command to encapsulate it. We define \twopartdef as follows.

\newcommand{\twopartdef}[4]
{
	\left\{
		\begin{array}{ll}
			#1 & \mbox{if } #2 \\
			#3 & \mbox{if } #4
		\end{array}
	\right.
}

Then we could call it as follows:

|x| = \twopartdef { x } {x \geq 0} {-x} {x < 0}

The command \threepartdef is very similar to \twopartdef.

\newcommand{\threepartdef}[6]
{
	\left\{
		\begin{array}{lll}
			#1 & \mbox{if } #2 \\
			#3 & \mbox{if } #4 \\
			#5 & \mbox{if } #6
		\end{array}
	\right.
}

You could call \threepartdef for the Möbius function as follows.

\mu(n) = \threepartdef
{1}      {n=1}
{0}      {a^2 \,|\, n \mbox{ for some } a > 1}
{(-1)^r} {n \mbox{ has } r \mbox{ distinct prime factors}}

Related posts:

Typesetting music in LaTeX
How to display side-by-side figures in LaTeX
Including images in LaTeX
LaTeX and PowerPoint presentations
How to put PDF properties in a LaTeX file

The default font options for the PowerShell console are limited: raster fonts and Lucida Console. Raster fonts are the default, though Lucida Console is an improvement. In my opinion, Consolas is even better, but it’s not on the list of options.

Mastering PowerShell by Tobias Weltner explains how to expand the list of font options for the PowerShell console. The same trick increases the list of font options in the Windows command prompt cmd.exe as well. The book is free for download. See page 16 for details. However, I have two comments about the instructions it gives.

First, the book says “The name must be exactly the same as the official font name, just the way it’s stated under [registry key].” However, the Consolas font is listed in the registry as “Consolas (True Type)”. You should enter “Consolas” and leave out the parenthetical description.

Second, the book says “the new font will work only after you either log off at least once or restart your computer.” When I tried it, logging off was not sufficient; I had to reboot my computer before the font change would work.

Related posts:

Improved PowerShell prompt
A couple thoughts on typography
Better R console fonts

I tried to use the Equation Editor in Microsoft Word years ago and hated it. It was hard to use and produced ugly output. I tried it again recently and was pleasantly surprised. I’m using Word 2007. I don’t remember what version I’d tried before.

I’ve long said that math written in Word is ugly, and it usually is. But the fault lies with users, like myself, not with Word. I realize now that the problem is that most people writing math in Word are not using the Equation Editor. LaTeX produces ugly math too when people do not use it correctly, though this happens less often.

Math typography is subtle. For example, mathematical symbols are set in an italic font that is not quite the same as the italic font used in prose. Also, word-like symbols such as “log” or “cos” are not set in italics. I imagine most people do not consciously notice these conventions — I never noticed until I learned to use LaTeX — but subconsciously notice when the conventions are violated. The conventions of math typography give clues that help readers distinguish, for example, the English indefinite article “a” from a variable named “a” and to distinguish the symbol for maximum from the product of variables “m”, “a”, and “x.”

Microsoft’s Equation Editor typesets math correctly. Word documents usually do not, but only because folks usually do not use the Equation Editor. In the following example, I set the same equation three times: using ordinary text, using ordinary italic for the “x”, and finally using the Equation Editor.

Note that the “x” in the third version is not the same as the italic “x” in the second version. The prose in this example is set in Calibri font and the Equation Editor uses Cambria Math font. Also, I did not tell Word to format “sin” and “cos” one way and “x” another or tell it what font to use; I simply typed sin^2 x + cos^2 x = 1 into the Equation Editor and it formatted the result as above. I haven’t used it much, but the Equation Editor seems to be more capable and easier to use than I thought.

Here are a few more examples of Equation Editor output.

I still prefer using LaTeX for documents containing math symbols. I’ve used LaTeX for many years and I can typeset equations very quickly using it. But I’m glad to know that Word can typeset equations well and that the process is easier than I thought.

I tried out the Equation Editor because Bob Matthews suggested I try MathType, a third-party equation editor add-on for Microsoft Word. I haven’t tried MathType yet but from what I hear it produces even better output.

Related post: Contrasting Microsoft Word and LaTeX

Font embedding not such a good idea?

The most recent Boag World podcast interviewed Mark Boulton. Boulton has a contrarian opinion on font embedding. Nearly all web designers are excited about font embedding (the ability to have fonts download on-the-fly if a page uses a font not installed on the user’s computer). Bolton’s not so sure this is a good idea. Fonts are designed for a purpose, and most fonts were designed for print. The handful of fonts that were designed first for online viewing (Verdana, Georgia, etc.) are widely installed. If font embedding were a way to broaden the pallet of fonts designed for use on a computer monitor, that would be great. But the most likely use of font embedding would be to allow designers to use more fonts online that were not designed to be used online.

Comic Sans and dyslexia

Comic Sans is terribly overused. It’s not a bad font, but it’s often used in inappropriate contexts and has become a cliché for poor typographical taste.

However, I heard somewhere that people with dyslexia can read Comic Sans more easily than most other fonts. I think the explanation was that the font breaks some typical symmetries. For example, a “p” is not an exact mirror image of a “q.” (The former has a more pronounced serif on top.) On the other hand, the “b” and “d” do look like near mirror images. I wonder whether anyone has designed a font specifically to help people with dyslexia. Maybe such  fonts would exaggerate the asymmetries that were accidental in the design of Comic Sans. Delivering such fonts would be a good application of font embedding.

Update: Karl Ove Hufthammer left a comment pointing out Andika, a font with “easy-to-perceive letterforms that will not be readily confused with one another.” Here’s a sample.

Related posts

Periodic table of typefaces
Things that work best when you don’t notice them
Better R console fonts

Apparently there’s no HTML entity for the flat symbol, ♭. In my previous post, I just spelled out B-flat because I thought that was safer; it’s possible not everyone would have the fonts installed to display B♭ correctly.

So how do you display music symbols for flat, sharp, and natural in HTML? You can insert any symbol if you know its Unicode value, though you run the risk that someone viewing the page may not have the necessary fonts installed to view the symbol. Here are the Unicode values for flat, natural, and sharp.

Since the flat sign has Unicode value U+266D, you could enter ♭ into HTML to display that symbol.

The sharp sign raises an interesting question. I’m sure most web pages referring to G-sharp would use the number sign # (U+0023) rather than the sharp sign ♯ (U+266F). And why not? The number sign is conveniently located on a standard keyboard and the sharp sign isn’t. It would be nice if people used sharp symbols rather than number signs. It would make it easier to search on specifically musical terms. But it’s not going to happen.

Related posts:

Entering Unicode characters in Linux
Three ways to enter Unicode characters in Windows
Greek letters and math symbols in (X)HTML

I tried typesetting music in LaTeX some time ago and gave up. The packages I found were hard to install, the examples didn’t work, etc. This weekend I decided to try again. I tried plowing through the MusiXTeX documentation and got no further than I did last time.

I posted a note on StackOverflow and got some good responses. Nikhil Chelliah suggested I look at LilyPond. I had looked at LilyPond before, and @jleedev explained how to integrate LaTeX and LilyPond.

Here’s some sheet music I included in my previous post, March in 7/4 time.

Here’s a full-sized PDF file version of the music above. And here’s the LilyPond source code used to create the music.

\relative c' {
\time 7/4
\key f \major
\clef treble
f g f \times 2/3{ c8 c c} f4 g a
g a8. bes16 a4 g f g c,
f g f \times 2/3{ c8 c c} f4 g a
g a8. bes16 a4 g f e f
}

The notation looks cryptic at first, but it makes sense after a few minutes. The command \relative c' means that the following pitches will be relative to middle C. For example, the first note, F, is the F closest to middle C. Each note is the same length as the previous note by default, and the first note is a quarter note by default. The notation c8 means that the C is an eighth note, except it’s in the context of a triplet (\times 2/3) and so it’s an eighth note triplet. The next F is denoted f4 to indicate that we’re back to quarter notes.

The notation a8. says that the A is a dotted eighth note. For the next note, bes16 means a B-flat sixteenth note. The suffix “es” stands for “flat” and “is” stands for “sharp.” (The documentation says it’s Dutch. I’ve never seen it before.) I don’t understand why I had to tell it that the B was flat. The code specified earlier that the key was F major, which implies B’s are flat. I suppose the code for individual notes is decoupled from the code to draw the key signature. That would make entering music painful in keys that have lots of sharps or flats. Maybe there’s a way to specify default sharps or flats.

The comma in c, gives the absolute pitch of the C. In relative mode, LilyPond assumes by default that each pitch name refers to the pitch closest to its predecessor. The C closest to the previous note, F, would have been the C up one fourth rather than down one fifth, so the comma was necessary to tell LilyPond to go down.

If I were to do a lot of music processing, I’d probably look at a commercial package such as Sibelius. But for now I’m just interested in producing small excerpts like that above, and it looks like LilyPond may be fine.

Update: I double checked the rules about flats etc. Yes, I do have to specify explicitly that the B in this example is B-flat. If I just say b rather than bes, LilyPond will add a natural sign in front of the B! It’s strange. It is aware of the key signature: when I tell it the B is flat, it says “OK, then I don’t have to mark that specially since it’s implicit in the key signature.” And if I don’t tell it the B is flat, it says “Oh, that’s an exception to the key signature. Better mark it with a natural sign.”

Squidspot.com has created an interesting period table of typefaces.

Related post: Periodic table of Perl operators

A lot of good (La)TeX resources come from Germany. I assume from the amount of development and support activity, there are probably a lot of users as well. Does anyone know why TeX is apparently so strong in Germany? Is there something about the German language that TeX supports particularly well?

Fonts, translations, and programming languages have one thing in common: they work best when you don’t notice them.

If someone says “Hey, look at this cool font I just found!” you probably wouldn’t want to read a book set in that font. At least to an untrained eye, a great font will not stand out in a list of small samples. You have to see large blocks of text set in a font to appreciate it. Even then, most people will not consciously appreciate a very readable font.

Translations are similar. If you find yourself saying “What an interesting translation!” then the translator has probably fallen down on the job. A good translation is neither archaic nor trendy. It does not draw attention to itself but allows you to focus on the original content. I believe the English Standard Version achieves that with Bible translation.

Python is like a good font or a good translation. For years I’d look into Python briefly when someone would recommend it. I’d thumb through a Python book, but it all looked rather plain. Only later did I come to appreciate that the beauty of Python is that it is rather plain. It doesn’t call attention to itself. It just gets out of your way and lets you write programs. It seems to me that compared to other programming language communities, the Python community brags less about their language per se and more about what they’re able to do with it.

The default installation of R on Windows uses Courier New for the console font. Unfortunately, this font offers low contrast between the letter ‘l’ and the number ‘1.’ There is also poor contrast between the letter ‘O’ and the number ‘0.’ The contrast between period and commas is OK.

Lucida Console is an improvement. It has high contrast between ‘l’ and ‘1′, though ‘O’ and ‘0′ are still hard to distinguish. But my favorite console font is Consolas. It offers strong contrast between ‘l’ and ‘1′, commas and periods, and especially between lower case ‘o’, upper case ‘O’, and the number ‘0.’

Consolas is more legible while also fitting more characters into the same horizontal space. It can do this because it uses ClearType anti-aliasing while the other two fonts do not. Here is a sample of the three fonts magnified 4x to show the anti-aliasing.

I found setting the default console font in R a little tricky. Clicking on the Edit -> GUI preferences menu brings up the Rgui Configuration Editor. From there it’s obvious how to change the font. However, what I found surprising is that clicking the “OK” button only changes the font for the current session. I can’t think of another application that behaves analogously. To set your choice of font for all future sessions, click “Save” rather than “OK.”

Basic tasks are simple in CSS, but even slightly harder tasks can be incredibly difficult. Controlling fonts, margins, and so forth is a piece of cake. But controlling page layout is another matter. In his book Refactoring HTML, Elliotte Rusty Harold describes a technique as

so tricky that it took any smart people quite a few years of experimentation to develop the technique show here.  In fact, so many people searched for this while believing that it didn’t actually exist that this technique goes under the name “The Holy Grail.”

What is the incredibly difficult task that took so many years to discover? Teaching a web browser to play chess using only style sheets? No, three column layout. I kid you not. He goes on to say

The goal is simple: two fixed-width columns on the left and the right and a liquid center for the content in the middle.  (That something so frequently needed was so hard to invent doesn’t speak well of CSS as a language, but it s the language we have to work with.)

You can read more about the Holy Grail of CSS in an article by Matthew Levine.

I appreciate the advantages of CSS, though I do wish it didn’t have such a hockey stick learning curve. I’ve heard people say not to bother learning overly difficult technologies because if you find it too difficult, so will everyone else and it will die off. But CSS seems to be firmly established with no competitor.

I use LaTeX for math documents and PowerPoint for presentations. When I need to make a math presentation, I can’t have everything I want in one environment. I usually go with PowerPoint.

Yesterday I tried the LaTeX Beamer package based on a friend’s recommendation. I believe I’ll switch to using this package as my default for math presentations. Here are my notes on my experience with Beamer.

Installation

Beamer is available from SourceForge. The installation instructions begin by saying “Put all files somewhere where TeX can find them.” This made me think Beamer would be another undocumented software package, but just a few words later the instructions point to a 224-page PDF manual with plenty of detail. However, I would recommend a couple minor corrections to the documentation.

1. The manual says that if you want to install Beamer under MiKTeX, use the update wizard. But the update wizard will only update packages already installed. To install new packages with MiKTeX, use the Package Manager.
2. The manual says to install latex-beamer, pgf, and xcolor. The Package Manager shows no latex-beamer package, but does show a beamer package.

The installation went smoothly overall.

Using Beamer

I found Bruce Byfield’s introduction to Beamer helpful. The Beamer package is simple to use and well documented.

It’s nice to use real math typography rather than using PowerPoint hacks or pasting in LaTeX output as images. I also like animating bullet points simply by adding \pause to the end of an enumerated item.

Inserting images

The biggest advantage that PowerPoint has over LaTeX is working with images. With PowerPoint you can:

1. Paste images directly into your presentations.
2. Edit files in place.
3. Carry around your entire presentation as a single file.
4. Include multiple image formats in a consistent way.

The last point may not seem like much until you’ve tried to figure out how to include images in LaTeX.