A recent e-mail correspondent writes:
I have a degree in applied statistics, and I’m really interested in the lectures notes you put on your website about Bayesian approaches and simulations. That’s something i need to discover and it looks really rich and interesting. I also use R on a very regular basis.
The purpose of this email is that I’m using LaTeX to write some documents, and i can’t find anything on how to install the FF Meta police, which is very clear and easy to read.
Have you anything about that by any chance?
First of all, I should take the Bayes notes down and point you in the direction of The Book (done!).
On FFMeta, I don’t quite get the references to “FF Meta police”. But here is how I did it (below the fold).
Such much web outrage over the Futura-Verdana thing at Ikea; we’re all type nerds now if Time is writing on it.
Strike back at IKEA. Next time you are there, ask the staff for help by referring to products by name.
Ryan Tibshirani’s Mathpad looks it could be very cool. I am a fan of LaTeXit, as I’ve blogged on here.
TeX on-the-fly for my blog (LatexRender) needs to be updated (I think I broke it when I upgraded the server, clobbering the latex install or something).
A recent comment reads:
Nice font you are using in your CV, syllabi, etc. — What is it called?
How nice of you to notice. Its FFMeta. I’m almost over it: it is a little corporate, used by Bank of America, the Queensland Government, the ANZ Bank.
There are some nice “hint of a serif” humanist typefaces out there I could look at too, but life is short. I’ve got Meta nicely integrated with my LaTeX setup, and unlikely to ever have the time to go through that again. Oh well.
I’m even wondering about something oldish like Baskerville or Didot. Sometimes technical papers — or topical, timely papers — can look all that more authoritative (!) when set in something older looking.
Some wisdom on this from Jason Santa Maria (with a lovely looking blog, btw) in turn referencing Mike Davidson:
When there are a few hundred people sitting around at a conference, chances are good that they know where they are and what they’re attending. Usually, the most vital piece of information they don’t know is everyone else’s name.
Too right. My own design, from PolMeth 04, rendered in Zurich-BT Ultra-Black Extended:
1 of 3. My TA for 350C, Thomas Brambor alerted me to electoral-vote.com. It looks quite promising, especially the polling data in CSV format…!
2 of 3. Doug Rivers put me on to The Rather Difficult Font Game. I didn’t get a perfect score. Sniff.
3 of 3. Matt Levendusky alerted me to a discussion of the use of Optima by the McCain campaign in some of the NYTimes blogs. Optima is hardly a “wow” typeface, with a little bit of interest coming from the use of its bold variant in the McCain logo (see below).
The Monterey Bay Aquarium uses Optima, as did Expo 67; what more can I say…?
I am one of a number of LaTeX users on the Mac platform noticing some font-mangling by formerly reliable friends such as LaTeX Equation Editor. The issue seems to be that Apple’s Type Services’ font caches are getting corrupted along the way, and then anything that relies on them will give odd renderings of typefaces. This includes applications such as Preview.app, Skim.app, and of course LaTeX equation editor. Adobe doesn’t use ATSServer and doesn’t seem to be affected.
There has been some web traffic on this around the place: e.g., here, and a possible solution here.
The first sign of trouble is launching LaTeX Equation Editor and encountering this:
which is actually good PDF despite the appearence. Dragging and dropping this into my blogging software produced what is supposed to look like:
Still, the issue is what would happen if you dragged this Keynote:
Deleting font caches and databases and rebooting is a solution I am working with, and then staying away from LaTeX Equation Editor… The issue is what other product to use? LaTeXIt doesn’t seem to play nice with non Computer Modern typefaces… Oh well.
Update: after using atsutil to clobber the font databases and restarting the machine, LaTeXIt seems to work like a charm. See the thumbnail below.
We’re a step closer. Safari 3.1 will support it (inter alia), and see here for some background.
But how will it render under IE?
By Liu Young (born in China, educated in Germany), from Doug Hall via Mal Enright.
More over the fold.
Opinion:
My former student John Bullock forwarded me this piece from the Boston Globe, a quick typological look at the campaigns.
The article doesn’t mention the substantial use of Gotham by the Obama campaign. Samples appear in the screenshot I just grabbed from the Obama website (thumbnail below), but appears perhaps most prominently in the “CHANGE” logo that follows Obama wherever he goes. See the 2nd screenshot below, from the Hoefler and Frere-Jones interactive font-tryout page.
The Gotham “C H” with generous kerning is lovely, slightly modernist retro, but elegant, simple, and eye-catching, and a little unusual for a big political campaign (which tend to go with old faithfuls, see the article above). At least for me, Gotham also evokes a 1930s-ish, American, Old Left, modernist realism (and indeed, thats exactly what Gotham’s designer, Tobias Frere-Jones was shooting for), but I think has been chosen for its trendy “now” feel more so than its allusions to an older, progressive era.
Powered by WordPress
Bad Behavior has blocked 2982 access attempts in the last 7 days.
