Firefly

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Wednesday 27 February 2008 @11:14

Seems unlikely, but who am I to argue with the algorithm?

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

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Two types of types

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Thursday 15 February 2007 @18:40

Follow-up about BitTorrent: at some point, I read the FAQ and found that for BT to work correctly, one needs to forward ports to overcome the Network Address Translation done by the router. (Would have been easy except that I forgot my router config password and had to reset it.) But after doing that, the number of peers increased significantly, and with it both upload and download rates. That’s more like it!

In my email the other day, I received a message with an image claiming that:

Wow, sounds great, I thought. Where was this when I was doing my thesis research? So is it based on the lambda calculus? I read on:

Ah, that kind of ‘type system’. Come to think of it, the message was from myfonts.com…

Software that makes us stupid

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Sunday 17 September 2006 @11:18

This TV show advert — plastered all around New York lately — is making me angry. Why?

That curly thing is not an apostrophe! And you don’t have to be a font freak or typography wonk to know the difference. In grade school — before I could distinguish Garamond from Gill Sans, before Adobe Systems was founded — I knew that an apostrophe curved down and to the left.

So how did this happen? Considering that computer keyboards have no ‘left curly single quote’ key — and that probably 98% of all computer users wouldn’t know how to type that character if their lives depended on it — how could this gaffe occur when the apostrophe key is right there on your keyboard?

Yes, you know where I’m going with this: SmartQuotes.™

This is the feature on many word processors and desktop publishers that automatically converts typewriter-style straight quotes into curly ones. Unfortunately, it does a poor job of it, and that’s often worse than not doing the job at all.

Now, I’m not one to ridicule or be offended by home-made garage sale fliers and grocery store signage with their superfluous quotation marks. Er, well, I don’t extensively ridicule them.

But here is a case of a major broadcasting firm with professional graphic artists plastering their large full-color ads across a major city in which you can’t swing a cat without hitting a designer. There’s just no excuse.

P.S., it’s even wrong in the HTML on the web site:

MetaOCaml proof

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Tuesday 23 May 2006 @18:11

No, not proof of a theorem… a pre-print from Elsevier, the publisher of my MetaOCaml paper. It arrived by email this morning. So far, practically all of my publications are with ACM or Springer. This is the first that will appear in ScienceDirect. I almost feel like a real scientist.

Without digressing too much on the role of scientific publishers in the Internet age, one thing I do enjoy is getting back a proof that looks like a proper article. Whether it’s due to the banner, or little widgets they add in the header and footer, or just a typeface other than Computer Modern or Times, at least it looks like it was touched by a publishing house since I submitted it.

I’m reminded of visiting technical and academic bookstores when I was still an undergrad, or the first years of grad school. I would pick up a slim $90, 180-page treatise by some professor, and be disappointed when it looked exactly like what I could have printed out myself if only I had access to the .tex file: the Computer Modern typeface and LaTeX book class, with all the default settings. Not that these are necessarily ugly, they’re just not special. For $90 a copy, is it too much to ask that the publisher hire a designer?

The strange thing with this paper is that I used the LaTeX document class provided by Elsevier for my manuscript, and it looked like garbage. It was full of widows and orphans and huge irregular spaces between paragraphs. One of the reviewers even commented, “this can’t possibly be done by TeX.” I was indeed embarrassed by the typography, and I could have fixed it, but I chose not to stray from the publisher’s settings.

Maybe their public document class is intentionally crummy. That way, when you get back the real proofs, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. It will look like they actually did something in exchange for you relinquishing your copyright…

Nothing shouts ‘amateur’ like PowerPoint

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Friday 5 May 2006 @1:09

Here is one reason of many that PowerPoint makes you look like a total amateur: it cannot kern fonts. Just look at the distance between the initial capital letters and the rest of the words below. ‘Yale’ is the most egregious example, and utterly embarrassing if you’re representing Yale and this horrid bit of text appears on your title slide. No, there is not a space character between the ‘Y’ and the ‘a’… PPT just renders it that way.

The default way to lay out letters digitally is to use the bounding box of each letter. Just imagine the smallest rectangle that encloses the whole letter. And then stack those rectangles together like books on a shelf. This works for most pairs of letters, but sometimes they look terrible that way.

To fix this, all digital fonts contain information about pairs of letters that should be moved slightly closer together than they would otherwise appear. This is called kerning. Digital fonts have been designed with kerning pairs, and computers have set type with them, since at least the 1970s. And here it is 30 years later… I guess Microsoft didn’t get the memo.

The strange thing is, Microsoft Word can kern the fonts, but inexplicably it is turned off by default. You have to go into the menus and ask for it. If I ask PowerPoint about kerning, it draws a total blank:

Now, you may argue that people who have not studied typography or design won’t notice this. So, using PowerPoint would only make you look like an amateur designer to other designers, not an amateur computer scientist or chemist or management consultant.

But I believe this is dead wrong. People who haven’t studied design can’t identify problems like this, but I’m pretty sure they notice them at some level. An audience member will come away thinking my visual aids are very professional looking and yours are crappy. He doesn’t necessarily know whether it was the layout, the color scheme, the choice of font, or the software itself. But the impression left by your visual aids will certainly impact your message. Here is the same text, set in the same size, in Apple’s Keynote software. Notice that the ‘e’ is tucked slightly under the ‘T’ in ‘Team’.

I rant about this problem to myself whenever I see it on someone else’s slides, which is basically whenever I attend a talk. I was prompted to post this today because we had an awards ceremony for students last night, and I had to stare at the word “V aledictorian” in PowerPoint for a while.

Say no to PowerPoint, or at least start bugging Microsoft to fix this!