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…
Blog Archives
Typesetting music in LaTeX and LilyPond
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…
Periodic table of Typefaces
Squidspot.com has created an interesting period table of typefaces. Related post: Periodic table of Perl operators
Things that work best when you don't notice them
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…
Better R console fonts
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…
Accented letters in HTML, TeX, and MS Word
I frequently need to look up how to add diacritical marks to letters in HTML, TeX, and Microsoft Word, though not quite frequently enough to commit the information to my long-term memory. So today I wrote up a set of…
Greek letters and math symbols in (X)HTML
It’s not hard to use Greek letters and math symbols in (X)HTML, but apparently it’s not common knowledge either. Many pages insert little image files every time they need a special character. Such web pages look a little like ransom…
Contrasting Microsoft Word and LaTeX
Here’s an interesting graph from Marko Pinteric comparing Microsoft Word and Donald Knuth’s LaTeX. According to the graph, LaTeX becomes easier to use relative to Microsoft Word as the task becomes more complex. That matches my experience, though I’d add a…
Cutting and pasting Turing
Charles Petzold describes on his blog how he wrote his book The Annotated Turing, a commentary on Alan Turing‘s seminal computer science paper. The book is scheduled to be released June 10. Petzold began by literally cutting and pasting pieces…
