Time Wasted on Binaries

More fonts for the web

bjorn — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:16:08 +0000

Typography for the web is on the roll.

Sites like fontsquirrel and fontspring offer loads of free and open-source embeddable fonts for hosting on your own server, and hosted solutions like typekit.com are partnering up with big type foundries like fontfont and veer.

The big foundries have been a bit slow in adapting their font licenses for this newfangled technology; after all, the MS-proprietary format .eot has only been around since IE5 or something.

Monotype, Linotype and ITC have recently joined forces in a service similar to Typekit called webfonts.fonts.com. This is great news, since beforementioned foundries holds classics like Frutiger®, Univers®, Helvetica®, ITC Franklin Gothic and ITC Avant Garde® to name a few…

I got my beta account invite to the service day before yesterday and have just started toying with it a bit. The UI is a bit lacking when compared to typekit, and many of the poster-name fonts mentioned on the site hasn’t been added yet. Font replacement looks snappy enough however. Think I need to play around a bit more with the service before I can give an honest opinion.

subscript/superscript character challenges in HTML

bjorn — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:36:13 +0000

(this entry is a bit of a mess, just posting it for reference now, might get around to expand the topic at a later time)

According to the internet, IE has issues with the UTF-8 version of subscript 2: CO₂ … which unfortunately turns out to be correct, also in IE8. IE just displays an outlined square.

when writing m², you can either use the entity ² or ². There is no entity for subscript-2 and the UTF-character ₂ doesn’t work in IE Without some extra CSS in the document they differ a bit, ² being more typographically correct. ^{and _{elements messes up the line spacing.}}

Examples (entities vs. sup/sub): m² vs. m² and CO₂ vs. CO₂

_{Related info:}

Extra characters for Cufon/sIFR

bjorn — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:11:52 +0000

When rendering typefaces for use with Cúfon or sIFR, it’s not enough with choosing basic latin if you want to be able to write in swedish or danish. Here’s the string I’m using for configuration:

“”‘’…_&-–—åäöæøàèìòùáéíóúâêîôûäëïöüãõñçÅÄÖÆØÀÈÌÒÙÁÉÍÓÚÂÊÎÔÛÄËÏÖÜÃÕÑÇ©®™′″´×⁺

That tends to cover the most common issues, including WordPress punctuation.

How to make it work

Adding extra characters when rendering font files for Cufón is fairly straightforward; just paste that string into the text field labeled “.. and also these single characters” and render away.

When generating .swf-files for use with sIFR, select the text object in the .fla file that comes with the download, 2) click the character embedding button, and 3) paste the text string in the field. Generate the .swf, and done!

MP3 Amp

bjorn — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:56:41 +0000

I’ll take two, please.

Herb Albert – Spanish Flea

bjorn — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:43:41 +0000

This song has been going around like the flu in the office the last couple of months. Spanish Flea by Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass… Here’s what has to be the funniest interpretation ever of it:

Och nu brinner hela skogen

bjorn — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:54:53 +0000

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Jazz is not dead … it just smells funny

bjorn — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:16:16 +0000

Finally breaking the silence around here, since Anders from ofokuserat challenged me in a band-relay game. I got the letter Z (which, I guess, is the last character?) and the first band that came to mind was Zero 7. But since I couldn’t think of a single song of theirs I really like, I’m going with Frank Zappa.

Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best.

Linkdumping

bjorn — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 23:09:50 +0000

Here are parts of todays finds, jotted down for later reference: GZIP compression, HTTP Caching, the Pareto principle (plus the wikipedia equivalent), passing elements to event handlers with jQuery, CSS Compress for WordPress, This day in type, Pingdom, We love TXP, Jon Hicks’ google reader theme, lovely inspiring typography works by Craig Ward…

… and now I can finally quit Safari.

How to force UTF-8 encoding in mail.app

bjorn — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 10:17:51 +0000

Just open up the terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"

It was that easy. Not everyone has to do that I guess, but if you, like me, have had a problem with Outlook users asking you why you’re writing to them in Chinese, this might help get them off your back

Finally! Flickr adds collections

bjorn — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:05:51 +0000

Ah, finally flickr provides a way to organise one’s photosets! From the Flickr Blog:

Today we launched what’s probably the most requested feature over the last few years: a way to categorize and organize your photo sets! In the past this feature has been referred to as “sets of sets” or “subsets”. After today, we’ll know it as “collections”.

What are collections, you ask? A collection is a container into which you can place either sets or other collections, allowing you to create a hierarchy as deep as 5 collections. You can place as many of your sets into a collection as you like, and a set can be in as many different collections as you like.

It’ll be exciting to see how people will put this to use. And it’s a good as ever reason to open up that organizr and do some spring cleaning amongst them photosets.