I've always wanted to design a font. That's actually why I started gfonted. That project is now dormant, but it spawned gdkrgb and libart, so it was certainly interesting.

Anyway, when pfaedit crossed my radar screen, one of the first things I tried is tracing the font a specimen sheet I had fallen in love with. The program is crude, let me tell you, but strangely usable anyway. Before too long, I had all of the letters in the original sample, uppercase and lowercase, drawn.

There are some letters which are standard in the alphabet now, but weren't standard when the specimen sheet was printed (only a bit more than a hundred years after Gutenberg). I would have to draw these myself.

So over the past few days, I did. I'm pleased with the results. None of the people I've showed it to have been able to guess which four letters I drew from scratch. Can you?

Assemblies

I had a dream last night that I was asking miguel about assemblies. Inspired by the dream, I stopped by #gnome and had a very nice chat with miguel, bjf, and others about the topic. I still haven't found a good document that explains them - bjf's advice was to play with Microsoft's implementation. In any case, I'm convinced that there are some very good ideas there. Most of the time, when we build larger systems out of components, we just throw the pieces together and cross our fingers. Sometimes it works, sometimes Murphy's Law reigns. The idea of assemblies is apparently much more systematic.

As an old-timer, the name tickles me a bit. The name "assembly" used to refer to assembly language, which is basically obsolete these days, so I guess Microsoft decided that the slot in the namespace was free. In any case, it evokes a much older time.

Miguel is certainly right about one thing: Microsoft has a lot of very smart people who are paid to think about difficult problems. To ignore their work, for any reason, is stupid. Embrace and extend!

jbig2

Jbig2 implementations are starting to dribble out into the real world. We had a customer file come in recently that was created by Cvision's Cvista product. I hacked around a bit yesterday on jbig2dec, which is our (GPL) decoder project. It's fun stuff, and I hope we decide to ramp up the development on it. rillian is the main developer on it, but he hasn't had too much time for it either.