sachac

It turned out that going with Org Mode was an excellent idea! I wrote another post about the changes I made last night: https://sachachua.com/blog/2020/06/having-fun-kerning-using-...

Basically, tables rock, especially when you can use rectangle commands to copy and paste kerning values between classes you have to split up, and generating a test webpage programmatically is fun too. :D

I figured out that if you use the : session keyword, you can still see the prints before the exception. I tend to use something like :session "argh".

I think the built-in OTF support for contextual alternates still go by character pairs, so na na na will still look identical even if I can get ba na na to look slightly different. I can easily get SVG out of FontForge, though, and I've come across some programs that take text, randomize the glyphs used, and return an SVG. I might be able to figure out something like that. I probably won't go to that extent on my blog, but it may be fun to explore just for curiosity's sake

One of the things I want to do is to use autotrace centerline to get a basic stroke trace, and then manually tweak it so that drawing the glyphs makes sense. Then I can use that for SVG animations (there are Javascript tutorials for that), which I can use to help my kiddo learn how to write. (Whether I should teach her to forge my handwriting so early might be another matter... ;) )

The helpful poster wasn't me, but I should totally make the PDF link easier to get to. No one should ever need to give me their email address for stuff. :)

Hah, it's not really reproducible at this point, but I was so excited that I didn't want to wait until I got everything sorted out. I spent a little time last night kerning even more (it's surprisingly fun), so if the kerning at http://pages.sachachua.com/sachac-hand/files/test.html looks better for you, you can get the new font files from Github. Gosh, thanks for using the font right away!

The local lib stuff is so that you can get aglfn.txt into the right place for the python library. I'll see if that can be given a path. If so, I can include it in files/.

I tend to use print because it's easier for me to speed-read my sketchnotes that way, but I did come across a typography tutorial that explains how to do cursive connectors through variants. Maybe someday, if the kiddo starts learning cursive. :)

Contextual alternates and ligatures are on my todo list! :) https://ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/punknova?lang=en is an interesting model.

Oh! I should totally make a bold version instead of relying on the browser. Thanks to both of you for testing and troubleshooting! I'll do it later after the kiddo goes to bed. I'm excited about looking into alternate glyphs too.

I've used artist-mode with my tablet PC, which works surprisingly well. You can draw with the stylus and everything!

For other ways to produce graphics from text (especially within Emacs), check out the examples in http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#Publishing : ditaa, graphviz, plantuml... Cool stuff. =)

This is true! I've used keyboard macros with webpages and textareas to save myself lots of time. =)

Thanks for working on this! I didn't send a patch because I have terrible colour sense and haven't bothered checking for light backgrounds. I figured you knew about defface and already had plans for that at some point. I haven't played with faces much myself, so it was more of an excuse to share what I was learning with people. =) Looking forward to the upstream-colorized version!

I keep the month and year in my permalinks for that very reason. I want people to be able to get a sense, right away, of whether something is still likely to be valid. If I'm writing "evergreen" content or a page that's going to be updated over time, I make it a page, not a blog post. I usually add a small update log, too.

If you blog, you _want_ dates in there. It means that if you change your mind years later (and this happens!) and someone quotes you from a really old post (and possibly out of context), you can say, "That was years ago! Here's what I think now: ...". People are human, people change. If you're writing about tech, it's doubly important to keep dates in there - versions shift _so_ much over time.

I handle the logical vs chronological connections through writing pages and blog posts that link to resources, updating old blog posts with links, and keeping a manual index.

I used to use icomplete-mode (incremental completion for M-x), and now I use helm. Helm allows me to start typing "M-x buffer next" and see next-buffer and switch-to-next-buffer as the options. =)

That's a pity, as I find it helps me to be open-minded about editors. =) Still, it's Creative Commons-licensed, so feel free to make a new version. (Or even a version with a blurred out or redacted section... =) )

That's awesome! I hadn't come across Donald Alcock's books before, and I'm glad you recommended them. I've just ordered a copy of Illustrating C. Looking forward to being inspired by it!