India unveils a new symbol for the Rupee.
Tag Archives: orthography
PottyMouth moved to BitBucket
I’ve moved PottyMouth to BitBucket.org, where you can keep up to date with PottyMouth releases, subscribe to feeds, request features, and contribute patches. (It’s also on PyPi.)
In the last few months, I’ve fixed a bunch of poor design decisions on my part around encoding and repr() within PottyMouth, and added new syntax suggested by users. The latest version is 1.2.0.
The Signal Code Alphabet
Two new Romanian calligraphy fonts
Romanian calligraphy is a unique amalgam of Cyrillic, Blackletter, and Glagolitic influences on the Latin alphabet. Florinf over at Typophile is working on two nifty new faces, Arhaic Geo and Arhaic Cali, inspired by old Romanian calligraphic samples:
A Geometric Glagolitic Sans
Check out Kalin Varbanov‘s Glagolitic Alphabet Anatomy, a geometric, sans-serif re-imagining of Glagolitic, one of the oldest Slavic alphabets.
Unicode in five minutes
Someone over at Linden Labs is a bigger Unicode geek than me. And that’s really saying something.
All hail the Crossbar I
A comprehensive list of typographic conventions in comic books, including the Crossbar I rule:
An “I” with the crossbars on top and bottom is virtually only used for the personal pronoun, “I.” The only other allowable use of the “crossbar I” is in abbreviations. Any other instance of the letter should just be the vertical stroke version.
Until reading this I thought my own preference for the Crossbar I in these cases was some weird personality defect. Now I can fire my therapist and add OpenType ligatures for the Crossbar I to all my fonts instead.
Cyrillic gone wild! or at least gone all speculative-fiction.
Experiments in typographic alternate history have produced Елброкан (Ælbrocan), an excellent Cyrillic Fraktur by Guifa (inspired by the discussion about my very own Shark, wow) and Калоян (Kaloyan), an awesome Cyrillic Uncial. Move over, boring old Устав (Ustav).
SuperCache not so much with the “Super”
In reaction to the more than 34,000 visitors that Why your Flash website sucks generated (and is still generating) Jeremy enabled WordPress’s SuperCache for me.
Turns out SuperCache does a less than super job with non-ASCII characters, failing to encode them to HTML entities, and instead writing them out as multi-byte UTF-8 sequences:
Alphabet Soup ported to Inkscape/SVG
I got this email Tuesday from Joel Holdsworth, announcing that he had ported my Alphabet Soup pseudo-letter-generator from a bitmap to a vector model, and turned it into an Inkscape plug-in. He tells me that the extension will likely be included with Inkscape v0.47.
I cannot begin to express how phenomenally awesome this is. This is the kind of news that keeps me writing, and releasing, little free software projects. Six years ago I wrote Alphabet Soup as a little art project; it was fun. I released it under an open source license, and then never got around to improving it to output a vector format. Then somebody I’ve never met comes along, and not only improves it, but integrates it into a bigger free software project and it will soon be available to thousands of users in a greatly improved form.
You can pull the extension out of Inkscape’s SVN here. You’ll need these files:
share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.inx share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.py share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup_config.py share/extensions/alphabet_soup/*.svg
Thanks Joel. Thanks Inkscape. I’m feeling pretty damn freetarded right now, and it feels good.