COMPUTER: Hello, user! Your wireless card isn’t going to work today.
USER: What?? Why not? It worked yesterday. In fact, it worked all last week.
COMPUTER: Tough. Today it won’t.
USER: Well, you can’t trick me. I haven’t touched the configuration since the last time I logged in; everything will be fine.
COMPUTER: No, it won’t. I’ll connect to your AP, but all of your DNS lookups will time out.
USER: Ha! I’ve got you! I’ll change the DNS settings so that the queries are directed to my other box.
COMPUTER: No you won’t. The network settings are hidden.
USER: They aren’t hidden; I’ve done this before, when I set up a DNS server on my other box and my router to handle local hostnames.
COMPUTER: That doesn’t matter. Every six months, all of the system admin tools are changed and replaced by your distribution. Whatever you learned last time is of no value.
USER: Pfft. I’ll still find it.
COMPUTER: You can try, but the names of the applications have changed too. Plus, the desktop environment you use has been revised twice, so none of the system admin apps are available in any menus.
USER: So? I’ll search for them. I guess that’s what I’m supposed to do.
COMPUTER: You can try, but you won’t guess the names. And the descriptions of the apps are not indexed by the search tool back-end.
USER: Now you’re just lying; I’ve read in blog post after blog post that the search framework indexes the descriptions of the applications.  I think I even heard it in a talk.
COMPUTER: Knock yourself out, then.
USER: Dammit! What the hell did they describe this thing as?? I’ve tried “network,” “connection,” and “settings” — all it finds is a VPN setup tool and something to configure Twitter accounts! I’m running out of synonyms.
COMPUTER: Don’t feel bad; the app you’re thinking of probably isn’t installed by default anyway.
USER: That’s absurd; of course the system admin apps are installed…. Right? And if it’s not, I’ll install it.
COMPUTER: From where?
USER: Gar.  Wait a second; I don’t need to mess with that anyway — I’ll edit /etc/resolv.conf
COMPUTER: Won’t help; you’re using DHCP.
USER: Well, I’ll just edit the DHCP settings…
COMPUTER: In what, the network admin tool?
USER: Dammit! No, no; can’t get out of control — I’ll edit the DHCP configuration files by hand. Let’s see … there appear to be two of them, in /etc/dhcp/ and /etc/dhcp3/ … I wonder which one is the right one?
COMPUTER: You should probably look that up.
USER: Ah; good idea. Let’s open Googl — Dammit!! Not funny!!
COMPUTER: Okay, that was a low blow. But you were getting ahead of yourself.
USER: Well, it backfired anyway. I just realized I don’t *need* DNS at all; I can look up all of the IP addresses I want to visit on one of my other PCs, then enter them by number in the location bar.
COMPUTER: Actually, you can’t. All this time, you assumed we were having a DNS problem, but in fact all of your traffic is going to time out, even if you enter the addresses by number.
USER: That’s ludicrous. Clearly that indicates a connectivity problem; I’ll log in to the router.
COMPUTER: Heh heh; good luck.
USER: Who needs luck? It’s six feet away, and I’m already connected to it. I can type in 192.168.1.1 and bring up the admin interface … any moment now … oh come on, hurry up … Dammit!!! What the hell is going on here?
COMPUTER: I can’t divulge that.
USER: Well it must be a hardware problem. Everything has been working fine for weeks, I haven’t touched the software or altered the configuration, and it isn’t on the router’s side.
COMPUTER: That’s a possibility; you should check to see if there are known issues related to this.
USER: Okay; I will, from by other box…. Well, my distribution has nothing similar sounding in the issue tracker, and everyone on the forum says it’s probably the DE at fault…. Although everyone on the DE mailing list says my distro changes some of the defaults, so they don’t support it. Unless it’s the browser…. But the browser forum says I’m eleven versions out of date, since they now issue “mandatory” updates every three days; what I’m running through my distro is “unsupported.” And I could download an update and install it manually over the distribution’s repository package, but then they wouldn’t support me if it turned out not to be the browser’s fault … plus I can’t download it anyway, since I have no connectivity. But I’m not sure that helps anyway. Clearly something was working fine yesterday and isn’t today. If it’s not hardware there’s very little else it could be. Apparently everybody in the kernel driver community hates this WiFi chip because of some dust-up in 2007, but I can’t really apply what they say about it on the mailing lists, because they’re all running a development kernel on some distribution that I think they seem to have written from scratch. But it doesn’t matter: it’s hardware; I can verify that by booting into OS X on the other partition.
[ -REBOOT- ]
COMPUTER: Welcome to OS X; everything is running normally.
USER: Dammit. Maybe if I just use OS X for a few days, the problem will go away again all on it’s own.

First, News Cycle is (of course), my open font revival of the classic ATF News Gothic from 1908.  In 1908, News Gothic included the Basic Latin character set, and that’s pretty much it.  The previous (0.2) release of News Cycle added to the original via a greatly expanded set of accents and extended character blocks, covering a large swath of Latin Extended-A and Latin Extended-B.

This release continues to expand on the original, and adds two new alphabets: Greek and Cyrillic.  There have been proprietary versions of News Gothic released by commercial foundries in the past that included one of these alphabets or the other, but as far as I can tell, News Cycle 0.4 is the first open source News Gothic to provide coverage for them.  In theory, they should look unified and coherent when mixed together with Latin.  That’s not inherently easy for someone who has very little experience reading Greek & Cyrillic languages, so by all means, if you have feedback, please send it.

I’ve also tried to learn a teensy bit more about OpenType funnery in this development cycle, so version 0.4 also includes “text figures” — aka, Oldstyle numerals.  I also updated many of the punctuation and non-alphabetic characters, and just cause I felt like it, added a nice selection of mathematical symbols (although they are limited to the symbols one would use to write in-line equations and expressions; complex and scaled symbols are a bit outside the scope).  Plus there are one or two easter eggs which I don’t feel like looking up at the moment, so let them serve as awesome little surprises.

The kerning was done by Igino Marini through his iKern service.  Hinting & instructions are autogenerated.  It is possible that I’ll be able to use ttfautohint to get better hinting; if so that will be made available in an update.  Right now you can download TTFs and OTFs from the Launchpad project page.  News Cycle is also provided through Google’s Web Font library, although there will be a delay before the new version is served up there, because the company does rigorous testing.

I’m currently working on bold; more about that in a week or so. Although … if you’re dying of curiosity, I did add the -Bold SFD to the Bazaar repository at Launchpad.  Don’t be alarmed when you open it, however — I’m starting with the regular version of each glyph and emboldening them one-by-one.  There aren’t that many glyphs done yet.

For example, most of the commercial News Gothics with Cyrillic support seem to use completely rectangular descenders, like so:

To me, that looks dull as dirt, so I’ve tried to add a tiny bit more nuance to News Cycle’s:

It could be entirely inappropriate; I don’t know.  I do have some alpha-testers … presumably they’ll tell me.  Speaking of which, if you’d like to be one, please let me know (or just grab the SFD from the Launchpad project page and start filing bugs; either method is fine).

Anyway, what I meant to write about was the fact that because adding a new alphabet is mentally demanding, I’ve found myself taking frequent breaks to add other characters — lots of mathematical symbols (more on that in another post), plus a whole set that just interest me for one peculiar reason or another.

Take U+214f, for example.  This is (officially) the “Samaritan source” symbol.  And I can find no documentation on what it means. My dad happens to be an antiquities guy, with specific expertise in 1st Century Christianity, and he’s never heard of it.  Nor have his buddies who study other (earlier and later) Centuries, for that matter.  It *seems* to be a bibliographic reference character, but why anyone would need a specific symbol to indicate that a source is Samaritan in origin, but not a symbol for, say, Essene sources, Gnostic sources, or what have ya, is a mystery.

U+2672 and U+2601 are simpler.  I added both to work with the open microblogging site Identi.ca. The former is the “recycle” symbol, which Identi.ca uses in place of the comparatively wordy “RT” used by Twitter when you repeat someone else’s notice.  Saving one precious character is a lot when 140 is the upper bound.  The latter is the “cloud” symbol, and it came up only because Platinum-Level Microblogger Bradley Kuhn uses it for shorthand whenever discussing/lamenting “cloud computing.” In fact, he commented that in most fonts, the U+2601 character most closely resembles a steaming pile of dog crap, which might be appropriate for discussing cloud computing, but is a bad representation of “cloud” otherwise.  I like Kuhn’s microblog stream a lot (talk about squeezing a lot into 140 characters), particularly his ability to live-blog conferences, so I wanted to make a decent cloud glyph.

Then there is the n-umlaut; it’s not defined in Unicode “proper” (and I air-quote when I say that), but you do need it to discuss the movie or hypothetical band Spinal Tap. In News Cycle, n-umlaut is U+E211 … in the Private Use Area (PUA).  Try saying that code point out loud if you wonder why I chose that location.

Finally, I’ve added an obscure and (apparently) controversial mathematical symbol at U+E210, also in the PUA. It is the “such that” symbol, which is used in proofs (akin to the existential quantifier ∃ or the therefore-symbol ∴, it just replaces notational text — it’s not a variable, operator, function, or anything). The trouble is, not only is it *not* in Unicode, but half of the mathematicians you talk to don’t even know what it is.  By which I mean “they don’t use it in practice, so they assume no one else should either.”  Typically when someone asks about it on the internets, they get told “no, that’s the ‘contains as an element’ symbol; you’re confused.”  What a tragedy.  There is documentation of its existence, of course. We just have to educate people.  For the time being, News Cycle might be the only font that includes it.  Tell your friends; it’s the only way well ever right this injustice.

Anyway, there’s more Cyrillic to come (particularly letterspacing), so I’m sure I’ll add to this list as time goes by.

Still, there are challenges, largely due to lack-of-familiarity with different typographic conventions in a new alphabet. For example, the “Zhe” character Ж — naively to the Latin-reader, it resembles a doubled K, however, that’s not its lineage. Which is something we might care about because News Gothic’s K is not symmetric about the horizontal axis. That is, the upper and lower arms are the same length, and they join into a horizontal crossmember.

The Zhe I’ve drawn is the screenshot here is in fact derived from K, in order to duplicate the angle used in the K, but to me I’m not quite sure if it looks right. But I’m also not sure if that’s just me, just my exposure to Ж in other sans serif fonts. The seriffed samples I’ve seen are not symmetric; they have curved upper arms, but I’m *really* not clear if that is supposed to carry over into sans serifs or not. There are a few commercial revivals of News Gothic, and their Zhes have all straight-arms, but seem symmetric. And if you’ve ever looked for an English book on the history of the Cyrillic alphabet, you know what a fool’s errand that is….

Onward and upward.  The thing is, I’ve still got questions like that for six or seven of the other capitals, and that’s not even touching the lowercase stuff and archaic letters.

On the other hand, there are some unfortunate “black boxes” in the larger MeeGo project, presumably relics of upstream corporate bootstrapping.  One of those is branding.  At more than one session, I heard community members beg and plead for somebody to drop the preschooler-like cartoon characters.  That’d be wise.

More directly, however, we have a problem with the logotype.  The MeeGo wiki details the logo itself:

… and gives typography guidelines for the “MeeGo font,” which it describes as DIN, linking to the Wikipedia entry on the family.  It also shows a specimen, in three weights:

Pretty clear, right? Well, not really. You see, whatever font they actually chose, it’s at the very least a proprietary remake of DIN.  You can verify that by looking at the two open font implementations of DIN, Paulo Silva’s Open DIN Schriften Engshrift and Open Source Publishing’s OSP DIN. Here’s a side-by-side sample:

As you can see, neither is even close. Starkly different proportions and weights.  Neither has the same non-alphabetic glyphs (though I have no idea where any of them come from).  And that includes the text sample; re-reading the MeeGo wiki page, it could be interpreted to say that the MeeGo logotype is not in DIN at all, but rather is an original design. But regardless of whether that is the intent, the vague “use DIN” instructions can’t be followed, because whatever font they’re using, it’s not available in open source form.  Moreover, since both of the open DIN revivals are based on scanning the original paper designs, it’s clear that they better represent the original typeface — the MeeGo design team may have bought a nice font, but you can hardly call it DIN.  It’s some sort of derivative.  And they won’t say which.

So what now? Adopt an open source DIN for MeeGo? Specify which proprietary DIN-derivative is in use, then wait for a font designer to produce a MeeGo-compatible variant of one of the open versions? Ditch it all together, and pick something with a little more character?

The latter option might be worth considering, since even if you ignore the fact that DIN is a blasé street-sign face that makes you sad just to look at, reading through OSP’s blog on the subject reveals that the widely-repeated mantra that the original DIN was “put into the public domain” is less-than-documented and less-than-clear.  So that’s at least two strikes, maybe three, depending on how highly you value your local streetsign.  But who knows; maybe there is a third open source DIN revival out there that I simply haven’t located yet.  Any hints?

I’m also happy to announce that thanks largely to Dave Crossland, Google has added News Cycle to the Google Web Font Directory.  This means if you want to use News Cycle as the body copy font for your site, you don’t have to download it at all; just visit its page on the GWFD site, and copy-n-paste the sample code.  Google serves up the font; everybody wins.  So far, it seems to be doing respectable numbers-wise, a little over 55,000 hits in the first five days.  That’s a start.

I’ve also added a Flattr micropayment link to the project page at Glyphography.com; if you want to help out and you use Flattr, every little bit helps by freeing up some time for me from the drudgery of freelancing to work on drawing glyphs and demystifying the technical aspects of font creation.  A substantial portion of the latter process involves me bugging Dave with beginner-level questions, to which I owe him a lot of thanks and hopefully a reduction in future pester-loads.  Google also has a donation link on its directory site, so feel free to use both if you really want to help.

That whole “keep the project going” thing ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie, either.  This 0.2 release is pretty basic: it covers a lot of punctuation and enough Latin to write in, but there’s still more to come.  My plan is for the next stable release (0.4) to include Cyrillic, Greek, and an extended selection of mathematical symbols.  There will be a lot of work involved in that.  After that, I have to start in on italic and boldface variants.  It never ends.

Anyway, my thanks to everyone who’s dropped a note to say they liked how it looks, plus a special thanks to those who helped me test out the font in languages other than English.

This is a straight-up Internet urban legend.  For starters, it’s flat out untrue that there are designers or photographers in *any* significant numbers who are required by “corporate policy” to use Photoshop.  Design firms don’t work that way.  Sure, there may be some person somewhere who has an office-wide rule to that effect — it’s a huge world — but it’s nonsense to suggest that it’s anything close to a meaningful blip in the stats.  But even if there was such a person, are any of us supposed to believe that they are not allowed to install GIMP on their computers — but that they will erase OS X or Windows and install Linux instead, in order to use Photoshop-on-Linux?  Are we supposed to believe that Management will allow that?

This chestnut is appealing, because it creates an appealingly noble protagonist: the strident designer who wants to use Linux, but isn’t allowed to, because he’s being held back by The Man.  How can we not want to help that prisoner of conscience?  But it’s an illusion: GIMP, like OpenOffice and Firefox, is available for Windows and OS X.  The prisoner has a path to freedom, and if he’s not taking it today, it’s not because Enemies of Freedom stand in the way, it’s because either the free apps are unknown to him or he’s looked and prefers what he uses now.  The crux is this: whatever barrier-to-usage exists that prevents a budding free-software user from installing and using GIMP on a non-free OS, that barrier is orders of magnitude smaller than the cost of writing-over the existing OS and installing a new one so that the user can use the hypothetical Photoshop-on-Linux.  The path to conversion is Free App on Existing OS, then Free OS altogether.  It is not Proprietary App on Free OS, then Freedom altogether.  The only people capable of thinking in reverse like that are operating system vendors.

I get why nobody likes that solution; it’s harder on the open source community.  It means we have to do hard, thankless work on components like GTK+-on-OSX, on installers and focus and different keybindings, on single-button pointing devices and application resources in screwy Apple Places, and jump through all kinds of other hoops that don’t really seem to earn us many more users. And it seems like an ethical compromise to port free software to a proprietary OS (though for some reason, it’s not to do the reverse…?)  It’s much easier to say “Hey, Adobe, you do all the work to port Photoshop to Linux, we’ll wait right over here.”

Honestly, any designer who wants to try using Photoshop on Linux right now, can.  The pricetag of a CrossOver license is way, way less than a new OSX box or a new Windows 7 license.  So why don’t these designers try that whenever they upgrade their PC hardware?  Partly it’s cause CrossOver ain’t perfect.  But the big reason is simply inertia, like every other PC user has.  Couple that with the fact that an office-ful of designers probably buys bundled licenses for  its Adobe products, and the fact that big firms have The IT Guys do all that installing stuff, and you have a situation where nobody’s going to change operating systems only to use the same apps they can already use today.

Every designer I know has a Dock full of apps; little ones, big ones, expensive ones, cheapo ones.  Flexible ones and single-purpose ones.  Nobody does design work 40 hours a week in a single application.  So if we want to bring designers into the fold of open source and free software, we have to start by making the free apps more appealing to the designer currently running other stuff on a proprietary OS.  Easier to download, easier to install, better integrated with the existing OS conventions.  We have to pre-load things like PSPI with GIMP, include more high-end plugins; we have to promote (and yeah, enhance) GIMP’s PSD import capabilities.  GIMP can already export to PSD, something I suspect Bacon isn’t aware of due to his corporate policy comment.  But of course Adobe changes and extends the format periodically, since it’s their ball.

The upshot is that designers care about results, and they’ll use any tool they can get their hands on if it can do cool stuff.  If anything, designers are less resistant to trying new applications than generic-office-workers or middle-managers. The company may insist on saving work in a file format like PSD, particularly when working in a team situation, but that’s an interoperability issue.  In all of the years I spent being a photographer and designer, and working with both, the only time I ever heard a company dictate a software choice, it was for a DAM that they used to keep in sync with remote clients and contractors.  And yep, it was a proprietary one: Extensis.  You know what — that’s another area where free software needs to do some work.  But designers who want to use Linux but can’t because of the lack of Adobe CS?  Come on.

Corporate buying policies are a big deal, and a big hurdle, but not here — they affect offices that upgrade their desktops en masse and buy suites of licenses, and (in my estimation, far more importantly) they affect schools and universities, who negotiate for software licenses in bulk, and have IT or “Academic Computing” offices that manage multiple campus-wide labs, usually remotely, rather than the teachers who actually spend their time in those labs with the students.  They affect governments, which is probably an even bigger obstacle because of all the rules and legal requirements that restrict their buying practices.  Open source needs to make in these areas.  Porting proprietary software to Linux and swapping out the OS isn’t going to do it.

Let’s put “There are people dying to use Linux, but can’t because they have to use Photoshop” to rest — you know,  so we can give air-time back to the other oft-repeated urban legend about GIMP adoption: that no “professional” users will touch it because of its “unprofessional” name.  Cause guess what: that’s flat out untrue, too.  But one canard at a time.

I chose News Gothic for a couple of reasons.  (A) there is not currently an open source implementation of it. (B) I kinda like it.  (C) News Gothic was a stalwart newspaper font, which appeals to me as a journalist.  (D) There’s room for improvement. The various proprietary revivals cover only Basic Latin, which leaves out much of the world.  Orthogonally, although there are several other good realist open source typefaces out there, the original News Gothic was designed at multiple weights: meaning Regular, Demi, Light, Heavy, etc.  To my knowledge there are extremely few open fonts that have this property, so reviving one built for it would potentially be useful in a lot of different ways.

That said, this is also intended to be a learning experience for me, which it certainly has been thus far.  Learning about type design, learning the open source font toolchain, and so on.  Not to mention learning about writing systems.  Thus far, I’ve only implemented Latin-based glyphs, and although I’ve done more than were originally included in the original 1908 specimens, I’ve already learned a lot about the writing system that I use and that much of the “Western” world uses.  That part’s quite entertaining.

In any event, this is only the beginning, but if you’re a die-hard glutton for punishment, you can download the FontForge sources from the Launchpad project page, or a binary TrueType font file (.ttf).  You can drop it into ~/.fonts/ on Linux, /Users/Yourname/Library/Fonts/ on OS X, or C:\Windows\Fonts\ on Windows. It is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, which grants users the right to modify and redistribute the font.  That said, if you know someone else who might be interested in it, you would be doing them a tremendous favor by pointing them here rather than simply emailing them a copy of your copy; this is an ongoing work that will change.

I’d appreciate all kinds of feedback; I’m relatively happy with the basic glyphs and metrics, but the glyphs I’m adding now are the ones I’m less familiar with — including accented characters.  In particular, if you’re a non-English reader and you find something that looks out of place in your language, let me know or file a “bug report” on the Launchpad project page.

Right now, News Cycle Regular covers 74% of Basic Latin, 74% of Latin-1 Supplement, 77% of Latin Extended-A, and a teeny tiny percentage of Latin Extended-B.  I’ve only just started the hinting.  Many thanks to the fine folks at the Open Font Library project and the wider open font community, particularly Dave Crossland (who puts up with a ton of lame questions from me), Nicolas Spalinger, and Denis Jacquerye.

So I’ve been reading the usability design docs for GNOME Shell and trying to figure out what I think they’re saying.  Frankly, it’s a bit unclear.  The Applications menu is broadly replaced by the “Activities” pane, which subsumes the role of Activities, Recent Documents, and Filesystem Bookmarks (yeah, I know; it’s still labeled “Places” despite the fact that that name communicates no information and ambiguously suggests it’s about Location services, which is a genuine embarrassment since GNOME is adding support for that re WiFi and Zeitgeist).  But here’s the issue: in the screenshots and screencasts, the Activities pane  always appears to hold four or five (tops) application icons.  If you need access to more than four or five applications on a regular basis, you have to search for them, then find the app you seek in an alphabetically-sorted list.  I can tell you right now that that is not going to work for me.  I regularly use two dozen or more apps.  Some of these I keep open perpetually (mainly communication apps, terminals, and Emacs), but most of the others I close down when not in use, simply to conserve memory/swap, etc (Inkscape, The Gimp, Rawstudio, Scribus, Krita, some Prism sites, Rhythmbox, MythTV, VLC, the calculator, Deluge, office apps, Grip, PiTiVi, Grsync, and so on and so on).

Having to search every time I need to launch the fifth-or-sixth app out of that list will take me more time.  If there’s no way to configure this behavior, I’m not looking forward to it.

That isn’t to say that the current Applications menu is All That.  It relies on strict categories, but the categories are broad and fill up rapidly.  Here’s the current count of my GNOME app menu categories:

1. accessories: 32
2. archimedes: 2
3. education: 3
4. games: 19
5. graphics: 41, 2 in a submenu
6. internet: 35
7. office: 22
8. other: 3
9. programming: 9
10. sound n video: 44
11. system tools: 15
12. unviersal access: 1

Obviously, you can see some bias in what tasks I do just by counting those menus, but the point is that everyone who uses their desktop to work has usage patterns.  More than one, I think.  I can group what I use my environment for broadly into office “stuff”, work communication, social communication, creative, entertainment, and utility computing.  They overlap; office stuff includes taking screenshots and writing, plus emailing and installing software.  But utility computing includes updating software, too, and work and social communication both could involve IM, Thunderbird, and other apps.

Still, in my own introspection, when I’m in one mode I need to stay in it for a length of time, then switch.  When I’m working, I’ll have and app open to test and I’ll write about it, and I’ll email/IM/VoIP questions and answers back-and-forth to its creator.  When I’m doing creative work, I’ll need to switch back and forth between the creative apps, often many many times.  But I stay within one circle of apps until I change modes.

The way I’ve customized GNOME 2.x to work with me in this method is through the use of launchers that I place on a dedicated panel, grouped roughly by task list, and by having the “perpetual” apps launch at login.  So far, I’m not seeing in the GNOME Shell documentation how I’ll be able to do anything like that in GNOME 3.  The Activities pane seems to limit the raw number of launchers I have immediate access to, and it seems to enforce either “most used” or “most recently used” as the sorting criterion — unclear which.  That has two problems: first, the perpetual apps are almost always going to qualify as “most used,” and when switching modes, a boatload of apps I specifically don’t need are going to qualify as “most recently used.”  In short, if I’m not able to customize the application launching behavior, it’s going to slow me down.