Also, the font used for the monospace examples in the post is a great kick to the nostalgia. Which one is it? It reminds me of https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...
[1] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...
I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.
“It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.”
As a rather, well... "creative" speller I blame Webster for locking things down and ruining it for the rest of us.
It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").
"Widows" (alone at the top) and "orphans" (alone at the bottom) are single lines cut off from the rest of a paragraph by a column/page break. The solution is generally just to fiddle with column/page breaks, which is purely typographical.
I'm sure that there's a distinct identity to X-Files dialog; it's just not due to this quirk.
I can totally see a fellow typography geek bragging about this to someone and them being horrified haha.
“And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.
“So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.
I've sometimes heard "orphan" to represent a single word left alone on a line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.
[1]: https://www.boggsfiles.com/x-files-scripts-by-season/season-... [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQbfRmeq3FsajjYcEuqDHv0kf2B...
Maybe this was not the rule, but something that he had always strived for, so he felt the need to call it out as something cool?
I wonder if I was ever taught to write this way and forgot, but I feel like I just learned the terms for the first time.
This might potentially
rejuvenate the writing
by disrupting habitual
patterns, which forces
more original choices.> BoVeX gives us a controlled tradeoff between these two states. By changing how much it costs for the text to be semantically wrong, we have a dial that allows us to smoothly interpolate between Lorem Epsom and Donald Knuth.
I did, and then I got a customer email about how they were using a display-zoom OS accessibility feature and things were truncated on their device. :')
See also: localizing your interface to German
Just build your layout so it can squash/stretch appropriately.
* Widow: a short final line of a paragraph that gets stranded at the top of the next page or column.
* Orphan: a first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of a page or column.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge
Edit: Also, LaTeX has specific penalties for those two: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/32116
> This presents a problem for the typical way that academic papers are written, which is to do all the work in a coffee-fueled fugue in the last few days before the deadline, then stay up all night writing the paper and finding citations for the pro-forma “related work” section which you did last but you know that the reviewers will insist upon
I have zero exposure to academia but chuckled because thats often what I do for blog posts :P
After reading this article I thought "wow that's really impressive and I hate it".
For the same reasons you mention, and the words seem to "blend together" into a blob of text and losing my interest.
Still super impressive that people do this though.
That was done by typing the whole paper twice, with added spaces the second time.
dumb is
what I
think
this
end
is
!
If somebody can find it, share it here, I’m going to post it on my own website so it is saved for history. The last time I saw it was 5 or 10 years ago, and there was only one or two copies on the internet at that time, and now there seems to be none.
https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/de/Morgenstern%2C_Christia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse%27s_Tale
I know the feeling - a lot of what I remember from the internet 20 years ago simply doesn't exist, and is unfindable on any search engine.
It’s not too hard if you try, once you get in the groove :-)
I know I couldn't today.
(source: https://github.com/allanlw/seeborg)
Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.
And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.
So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.
Manual: https://www.atarimania.com/st/files/protext_5_04_arnor.pdf
Screenshot of manual section: https://jumpshare.com/share/jOnMu7M36AOEWyoL0QDl
Strangely enough, this same book doesn't have the same problem on other platforms.
One of my favorite quotes is from Penn and Teller, "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect". AI has shifted that a bit.
But lots of technology has rendered formerly human-lead things obsolete, and I'm sure we'll find new ways to express creativity.
Video game text FAQs in general though were a dying genre before gen AI anyhow. Something I bemoan when I try to find one little piece of info and I'm faced with guides that are spread out on dozens of webpages for impressions of ads that I don't even see, or long videos that I have try to scroll through and take a ton of time just to find out if the person even went to the area I'm interested in. I sure miss Ctrl+F on GameFAQs.
The story talks about monospace fonts and how unappealing they could be for reading prose. It is a fascinating post on itself, but here's what happened - it caught my eye while I was busy, I clicked the link, it opened the page, I kept it hanging around and forgot about it. Then HN page got buried in my browser history. After a while, I found the tab, I read the story and it made me thinking if anyone shared any thoughts on HN. Instead of digging it up from browser history - I ran `consult-hn` and found the thread - it showed up in an org-mode-derived buffer of hn-reader.el. I was reading through the comments, and I was like: "yah, this probably would be easier and faster to read if I used a different font". I enabled variable-pitch-mode, but it didn't get much better - the default font I set for the face isn't great - I just needed something that existed in both Linux and Mac. I should've picked a better one.
"Let me try a different font", I thought. And how do you change the font family in Emacs? There's probably a way doing it through the UI, but thank you, no thank you - I have a programmable editor. I instinctively opened a scratch buffer and started typing: (set-face-attribute ... And at that point I realized: "Well, this would, a) Change the font everywhere b) What the heck were the parameters for this sucker?".
Of course, why not ask the LLM? I started typing the prompt, right in that buffer. I could've just finish typing and call (gptel-send). But, "what if this becomes a longer chat?". All my gptel-dedicated buffers get automatically saved. So, instead, I invoked (gptel-inline) - if the answer is short - I'd dismiss the popup and if I have follow-ups, I'll just continue.
LLM told me how to change the font in the current buffer. But I said: "I want to change it for any chosen buffer, since I'd be invoking it from the scratch buffer". At this point I was thinking: "I'm just fooling around, but let's see where it takes me..." It gave me the code snippet.
(with-current-buffer "target-buffer-name"
(setq buffer-face-mode-face '(:family "Georgia" :height 140))
(buffer-face-mode 1))
And at that point, I felt so stupid for wasting my time and I typed: "Can you just build me a consult picker, to select a font for a given buffer with a live preview."
And it just did. ~25 LOC. It took me far longer to write about it, in reality, the transition from a fleeting thought, from a mere idea to a concrete implementation took me seconds. Seconds!
And now I have a command that I can either keep in my scratch buffer, or stick into my config. Or literally just discard until next time I need to temporarily change the font in a given buffer.