Yesterday, I discovered that most (if not all) of Hermann Zapf's Manuale Typographicum is available online. I am not sure about the legality of the site, but given the limited availability of hard-copies, it gives some people an opportunity that they might not otherwise have.
With the ICFP deadline out of the way, I've finally put up a new version of my academic website, now hosted at EPFL: http://lamp.epfl.ch/~washburn/.
This website includes a link to a draft of my ICFP submission, "InforML: Scrapping your boilerplate with integrity", the previously mentioned draft version of "Generalizing parametricity using information-flow" submitted to LMCS, and a version of Principia Narcissus with the front and back cover included as part of the PDF (for those that would like that sort of thing).
I am a bit worried that my ICFP submission is just too dense to be comprehensible to someone who is not only well-versed in the area of type systems but also information-flow. I will see I guess.
I just finished hastily packaging up a prototype release of Gentzen Symbol (I can't avoid working on my ICFP paper all day). I would of course be interested in any feedback or problems people might have if they try using it, or suggestions on how to improve the design of the glyphs for future releases or development.
In September, I mentioned being quite excited by the new O'Reilly book Fonts & Encodings. Today, I was tempted to buy it from the campus bookstore at EPFL, but decided to do a little research because it would be nearly a 60% markup if I bought it here versus in the US. Fortunately, the EPFL library had purchased a copy which was not checked out.
Strangely, enough it is described as being translated from French by Scott Horne, but as far as I can tell there is no French edition (and if there is, I find it strange that the EPFL library and bookstore only had the English edition). Perhaps only the original manuscript by Yannis was in French.
I've only just begun to delve into it, at 1017 pages it will take some time to review it in depth, but if you are serious about typography I think this is a book that you will definitely want to own. It really covers the entire spectrum: Unicode text and how it works, through setting up fonts to display your text in operating systems and software, all the way to designing/editing/hinting fonts. I haven't looked at it in enough depth to be absolutely certain, but I am pretty sure it has nearly enough information on most formats that you could write software for them as well. It is truly a wondrous tome.
I will have to see what more I have to say once I've spent more time with it. One reason I thought of picking it up today was that it has quite a nice introduction to using METATYPE1, which with some luck I may use to start on a true meta-font for Gentzen Symbol. At the same time I guess I will try to package up the Type 1 PostScript version of Gentzen Symbol from my dissertation, assuming that there is anyone out there truly interested in using it in their own documents.
The blog at Hoefler & Frere-Jones has a nice little piece on the German glyph ß, which in turn has a link to a much more detailed article on Typefoundry.
I just finished the last revisions on it today. If you like, you can purchase a bound copy from Lulu at cost. You can also download a copy from them, but it does not look like it will have the cover (or at least as part of a single download). I am hoping I can put together a PDF that contains the front cover for download.
One of the things that rather surprised me when I was making the final tweaks to the cover was that the width of the printed book Lulu sent me is actually 209mm rather than the 210mm you would expect for A4. However, this did not seem to impact anything, so I will not worry about it. My best guess is that a millimeter or so of the page width is lost due to the binding process. I was surprised to find that I had managed to quite accurately center the large orange text on the cover quite well by eyeballing it.
This final version contains a number of typographical fixes and small wording changes. Chapter 5 received the greatest number of edits as I decided to proofread the entire chapter again. It was the last chapter written and had received the least amount of scrutiny.
I really hope that somehow I did not introduce some kind of terrible printing problem or mistake in the process of fixing all the things I noticed that were wrong with the draft printing I received. If I did, I expect most of the recipients will probably not tell me.
It just arrived this morning:
It looks pretty good, but there are definitely a few things I need to fine tune. For example, I need to center the text on the spine a little better.
Update: If you clicked through to Flickr, you would have seen my comment on it, but just in case, I should thank Tim Lindenbaum for kindly permitting me to use his daffodil photograph as the basis for the cover.
Okay, I am finally getting around to writing something, as requested, about how I implemented my dissertation.
I used pdfLaTeX for several reasons:
dvips/dvipdf so that that they will find the appropriate fonts. Using pdfLaTeX requires some configuration too, but it all happens in a single step.I had thought about trying luatex to allow me to automate a few things better, but I decided against it because it might have slowed me down.
I then used the memoir class. I was able to use that with relatively little configuration. The only major change I made from the defaults involved the configuration for the chapter titles. I did however wind up needing to use a slightly modified version of the class file itself. This was necessary so that I could use raised dots (·) instead of periods as separators; there was simply no way to configure this for some parts of the document otherwise.
For the bibliography I used Chung-chieh Shan's McBride BibTeX style. I made a slight change to that so that the three emdashes for repeated authors did not have space in between them.
I use Didier Rémy's mathpartir package for typesetting inference rules.
I used my tool otftofd to generate all the LaTeX infrastructure for the OpenType fonts I used. I hacked up some custom OMakefiles for the TrueType fonts. The bits I used for Dejvu Sans Mono are now part of the package I have made available.
I wrote a small sed script for converting my examples written in InforML with some special markup in comments into a form that could be accepted by LaTeX. This mostly involved escaping some characters and inserting uses of my macro for highlighting text.
That is everything I can think of from a high level. If there is something specific I did in my dissertation that you would like to know about, let me know.
As you may be noticing, I am gradually moving to a new theme for the site. I do not have a precise finished product in mind, but I am aiming for greater simplicity. I am hoping to converge on something over the course of the coming week.
I just finished fixing the bugs Brian noted in the previous version. You can grab it using darcs get from http://free-the-mallocs.com/repos/dejavu-sans-mono. This version also includes support for the oblique members of the family. These are accessed using \textsl{...} rather than \textit{...}. If you try it out, let me know if you have any problems.