Most people I know are content to use the fonts that came with their computer, and thus the ubiquity of Times and Verdana. Occasionally you come across a Mac user who cannot let go of Palatino. There are people, like me, who can’t quite seem to give up Helvetica, which I use on this blog if only because one can be fairly certain that almost every computer in the world has it or the Microsoft equivalent, Arial.
Most Macs also come with a few nice looking faces like Gil Sans, Hoefler, and Garamond. Over the years, I have also invested in a few faces that I regard as basic: Adobe’s Minion Pro, for a change of serif face, and Myriad Pro, because it is a nice sans serif alternative to Helvetica and is in widespread use on signs and diagrams: people respond to it well.
Too many people I know take type faces for granted or, perhaps worse, don’t realize that type faces are not necessarily to be shared liberally. There is a way around this: acquire and use quality free type faces. And since you asked, I do have some recommendations:
Gentium is an open source font — using something called the SIL license — that allows for a wide range of uses, including commercial applications, that comes in both a a face that contains a full range of glyphs as well as Gentium Basic which has the most commonly used glyphs found in Western European alphabets. There is also a slightly heavier version of the latter, Gentium Basic Book. Download it. Use it.
Another open source font collection is Bitstream’s Vera. It comes with a full range of faces, including a monospaced face that I use on my Macs while working in Textmate. Here’s the Bitstream sampler graphic:
Bitstream’s Sampler of the Open Source Vera Type Face
In addition to these, what I could consider core, faces, I also recommend checking out the following sites or pages:
And, of course, you can always make your own free font.
As I begin to write longer pieces again, after too long a hiatus, I find myself again not wanting to trust my work entirely to Word. I am not a knee-jerk Microsoft hater, or even one to complain about the bloat in Word. Word is great for any number of things, but it’s not so great at keeping things simple and it’s not so great at being able to have multiple outputs from a single file.
Working with a text editor like Textmate has shown me how working with plain text formatted using something like Fletcher Penney’s Multimarkdown means I can not only output to HTML, RTF, DOC, and even PDF, but that I can do so using my own style sheets. (And, yes, I fiddled a bit over the last day or two with going through LaTeX, which produces beautiful output but is far too complicated for me.) The ability to produce PDF output is especially welcome, and the fact that I finally got not only an install of PrinceXML working but I also got a working adaptation of a Textmate command to automate the process is a huge step forward for me.
Again with thanks to Fletcher Penney, I adapted the syntax for the convert to Word DOC:
# Process the MultiMarkdowndocument and convert to PDF using PrinceXML
# first figure out a name for the result
NAME="${TM_FILENAME:-untitled}"
BASENAME="${NAME%.*}"
DST="/tmp/$BASENAME"
#cd "${TM_MULTIMARKDOWN_PATH:-~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown}"
cd "${TM_MULTIMARKDOWN_PATH:-$HOME/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown}"
cd bin
./multimarkdown2XHTML.pl > "$DST.html"
# Get all this to Prince
require_cmd prince
prince "$DST.html"
open "$DST.pdf"I came across this snapshot of a whiteboard on Flickr. It essentially takes something like Covey’s seven habits and turns it into a timetable for a day. Well done!
As someone who now regularly spends time on a tractor, I think the ad below makes all the wrong moves:
The way I read the visuals of this ad is that Java and XML are the new hotness of Web 2.0 but OH! those databases, they are as slow and clumsy as an old tractor.
Given that I have yet to see a race car bring in a crop I can eat, I think I will opt for the coolness of tractors.
Cory Doctorow is one of those scarily productive writers. I haven’t read his fiction yet, but his work as a columnist for Make magazine and elsewhere has regularly impressed me, and his recent young adult novel, Little Brother is getting amazing reviews. In a recent column for Locus magazine, Doctorow shared some of the guidelines he has for himself that help him be productive. The explanations behind the guidelines are in the article, but here are the tips themselves:
I spent the day with Dwayne Gossen, a rice farmer whose family has long, and as it turns out wide, roots in Roberts Cove. Gossen is, on the one hand, quite typical of so many of the farmers I have met working on this book: he is a gentle man, quiet to the point of seeming shy, but a font of warmth and hospitality when asked an honest question. So many of these men are like this: it makes me wish that everyone took a turn at farming — perhaps rice farming in particular — so that more people would have a similar disposition.
Most of my time was spent with him in the cab of his Case-IH 385 tractor, a giant 8-wheel-drive machine that could pull the twenty-foot-wide blade of a water leveler through some fields almost at an idle. While the work would seem effortless standing by the side of a field, inside the cab Gossen spent much of his time turned around in his seat, his neck craned to check how much mud he was pulling in the blade, how well the tire ruts were filling as he worked the soil.
The view out the back of the cab as we make a turn.
Gossen was a patient teacher, explaining the intricacies of water leveling, much of which requires the ability to “see” beneath the surface of muddy water. At one point I finally exclaimed to him, “Dwayne, you are describing an intricate topography of hills and holes, of overpulling and underpulling, but all I see is muddy water.” Characteristically, Gossen smiled, laughed, and shook his head. How could a university professor not understand what was so obvious to him?
We’re back from Iota where we spent the entire day taking in the small festival the city hosts every year. Despite being very nervous about the folks in Mardi Gras costumes when we first arrived, Lily insisted on staying until the Mardi Gras came into town. Wise of her. As one of the first kids they saw, they showered her with candy.
