We Saw a Chicken …

Tag: font

  • What’s with the Council of Canadians, eh?

    Every couple of months, the Council of Canadians sends me a large and visually unappealing (1986 called; they want their typewriter font back) mailing, ranting about how those pesky Americans keep stealing our water.

    Close reading of the mailing (which is hard, given the woeful typography) shows that the initiatives being railed at are either:

    1. run by Canadian companies, or
    2. are part of legislation voted for by Canadians.

    Like most environmental things, Canada has an appalling record of looking after its abundant water. I think we think that the rest of the world thinks better of us than they do, or maybe even frankly cares about Canada.

    I’m a bit worried by the CoC’s use of the n-word — nationalist — since it has unpleasant connotations, like the BNP and SNLA. Also, at least half of the mailing could be summed up as The Maude Barlow Fanzine, with only slightly lower production quality than the average zine.

    And anyway, pesky Americans haven’t been stealing our water. Catherine hasn’t been sneaking any more out of the house than usual …

  • geourl


    GeoURL

  • my name, like transit

    scruss

  • yay, yay, IPA!

    Something has just changed on my Gentoo boxes; I can now display Unicode characters properly. John Wells’s International Phonetic Alphabet in Unicode now displays as it should.

    Now there’s nothing stopping me making weak pronunciation-related puns like “… to /Éš/ is human …”

  • Just like on the old Amstrad CPC

    For no really well defined reason, I used to spend hours designing really tiny bitmap fonts on my old Amstrad CPC. Now it seems that Jason Kottke has done the same thing, but in truetype format:

    silkscreen, in fontforge

    Silkscreen     reminds me of the HP49g‘s system fonts. You used to be able to get one of those in a scaleable form, so I wonder how similar it looks.

    I’m not sure if Jason’s copyright warning would work very well:

    This font is free for personal and corporate use and may be redistributed in this unmodified form on your Web site. I would ask that you not modify and then redistribute this font…although you may modify it for your own
    personal use.

    Back in my pre-press days, I discovered that a font becomes your design if you trivially modify just 5 glyphs. It’s an artefact of the early type producers lobbying to be able to rip each other off … not something that happens much in these DRM-obsessed days.