High-DPI, Subpixel Text Positioning, Hinting
What happens when an unstoppable bullet hits an impenetrable wall?
A while back I wrote a document about the interactions of high-density displays and font rendering options. I just went ahead and made it public, so, enjoy!
High-DPI, Subpixel Text Positioning, Hinting
Labels: fonts, hinting, textlayout, typography
In Montréal for “Boston” Summit
After a crazy Oktoberfest party in Kitchener last night, I woke up at 6:45 this morning, drove back to Toronto, took the ferry to the Island, took a
Porter flight to Montréal, took the
747 downtown, took the 165 up to Queen Mary, walked up the hill to
Polytechnique to arrive at the GNOME
“Boston” Summit. Found Matthias, Owen, Ryan, and Andreas in the hallway, shook hands and received hugs, and felt right at home!
Inside, saw Colin and Marina among a few other familiar faces and many new ones. Marina explained that the reason she looks so sleepy is that she was
blogging Ada Lovelace Day last night at 3am. Which of course reminded me that it was
Finding Ada yesterday. So I thought I hereby list my own pick of women that I have had the pleasure to work with, and who, in my opinion, have made a lasting contribution to GNOME. Now I don't have to preach these awesome women to this crowd, so I'll just summarize my own experience with them in a two lines. In no particular order:
Marina Zhurakhinskaya has been critical to the Women Outreach Program success and happening in recent years, so for that alone she deserves a special mention. That's independent of she being part of the every-awesome GNOME Shell team. Plus, she's so nice and great to hangout with in person.
Stormy Peters wrote in her job application for the GNOME Executive Director as part of her responsibilities to be the "mom". And she delivered! It was a pleasure being on the board when she was in charge. Plus, she's so energetic she brightens everyone around her whereever she goes!
Karen Sandler is awesome in spite of being a lawyer! I have not had the opportunity to work with her in her new role, but at the Software Freedom Law Center, she was a great resource to the GNOME board, and much easier to get hold of than, well, other Free Software lawyers. Now, I did not actually know about her DJ hobby (check her website!) and
wedding invitation until today. Waiting to run into her here to learn more :-D.
Rosanna Yuen is hard to find on Planet GNOME, and that's a shame. Many may not know her, she's sometimes better recognized as
zana. Fortunately she's been making more regular appearance at GUADEC. Anyway, it's hard to imagine anything in the Board / Foundation level getting happened without her back-office work. She moves the money, she keeps the book, she knows what happened in the board five years ago! Plus, sometimes researches and books the venue for Boston Summit too.
At GUADEC this year, and at the Summit today I had the opportunity to meet a few young ladies rather new to the GNOME family:
Pat,
Kat,
Meg, and
Nohemi: you girls rock! I hope I blog about you for the years to come!
Went for lunch with Marina and Owen, had a great Thai chicken green curry, and talked food. I was thinking about a small project to hack on while at the summit and I thought I pickup rewrapping lines in vte / gnome-terminal upon width change. It's a well-defined well-contained problem, I have a design in mind, and one of the most common requests against vte. I passed my design past Owen, we agreed that it should work, and I hope that's what I'm going to hack on. Stay tuned!
I want to close by a picture of my favorite GNOME artist with the coolest hair style:
[Woah, long post! Been a while since I last did that...]
Labels: Boston Summit, Finding Ada, gnome
Can I has intel tablet?
So I missed the intel party it seems. I assume the tablets are GLES2-ready and have a fair pixel density. If that is the case, I can make good use of one for OpenGL-based text rendering I'm experimenting with. If there are leftovers at the summit, I'd happily take one!
kthxbye :)
Labels: desktopsummit, guadec, intel, pango, textlayout
Arrived at the Desktop Summit
Just got to the
Desktop Summit in Berlin. It's lovely seeing everyone after two years.
I'm running
Text Layout Summit August 9th to 12th, so come find me for some font and text chat!
Labels: berlin, gnome, harfbuzz, pango
Contributor Agreements
It should be clear by now that I've gave up on blogging. Couple things I found worth writing down for da Nets today:
By way of GNOME Foundation Board of Directors election discussion I read the this LWN
piece titled "Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software". A couple remarks on it:
- I have a lot of respect for Mark and all, but, is that really what he believes?
- Mark would make a great Republican politician!
- "Project Harmony", that name has worked in the past. Twice. One resulted in Free Qt, the other in Free Java. What would it do this time?
In other, more this-worldly, news,
Bixi arrived in Toronto. It has become my favorite mode of transportation in downtown core.
GNOME 3.0
GNOME 3.0 released.
Slashdot effect observed.
No Slashdot post in sight.
Great job, everyone!
Labels: gnome, gnome3
CSS3 font goodness
Here's a nice blogpost from John Dagget of Firefox fame about the upcoming Firefox 4 supporting CSS3 OpenType font-feature support:
Firefox 4: OpenType font feature supportThis is a direct result of the
HarfBuzz code I've been working on for the past year or so. Exciting stuff for the web.
Labels: firefox, harfbuzz, opentype, typography
A Digital Media Primer for Geeks
This is a few weeks old, but so good I still wanted to share. Brought to you by xiph.org and Red Hat and featuring my old colleage, Monty, of xiph.org and Red Hat fame:
A Digital Media Primer for Geeks. Looking forward to the followup episodes.
Labels: audio, digital, monty, video, xiph.org
