His Deeds Are Dust

A while ago, I recovered my old font files from some crufty old SuperDisks, but did nothing more with them than copy them to my network storage, in the hope that that is a safer home.

Last weekend I was reading about the Fedora Fonts SIG, and decided to bring the old font files back to life. The Fonts SIG is concerned with packaging fonts for Fedora, but their pages have some interesting pointers on how they might be created as well, so I grabbed an old font and explored the tools that are available.

The font I picked is one I created when I was working with an old Stag PROM programmer, back in 1996. The programmer had a 14-segment LED display. The real thing doesn’t look much like the clean vertical pictures you’ll see in that Wikipeda article. The real characters are slightly oblique and there seems to be a kind of hexagonal mesh over the top that makes the segments look like the figure at the top of this posting.

I originally created the font by hand-coding the Type 1 format on a Sun workstation with Ghostscript installed, using my own tools to transform some readable path descriptions into the encrypted form.

This time, it seemed sensible to update the font to OpenType format, and I decided to use FontForge for the job.

Importing the old PFB file worked OK, and exporting is a doddle, except for FontForge complaining about overlapping segments in the font. There aren’t any, but there are some subroutines that move back to the glyph origin, causing some empty subpaths, which FontForge doesn’t ignore.

The only other problem was my attempt to upload the font to the Open Font Library, because the upload facility is broken. Ho hum.

Here’s the result of my hacking, a font called Segment14, released under the SIL Open Font License (OFL): segment14-1.0.tar.gz.

As suspected, the Samsung X120 notebook has the same keyboard quirks as many other Samsung laptops, so that some of the function keys don’t work correctly under Fedora 11. There are two problems and fixes needed. One, the kernel needs patching so that the quirks with missing key release events are also applied to the X120 (kernel bug 14052). Secondly, HAL needs patching to connect the function keys to turn the brightness up and down, etc., in the manner described by Fedora bug 504009 and Ubuntu bug 399911 (and many others).

However, I have confirmed that grabbing and patching kernel-2.6.30.9-90.fc11.src.rpm works me.

I’ve just charged my notebook’s battery fully, then allowed it to discharge while the machine was idle. First of all, I nobbled the power management settings in Fedora 11 to make sure that the screen stayed bright throughout, and it didn’t perform a neat shutdown when it guessed the battery was close to death.

I have the four cell Li-Ion battery, product ID AA-PB0TC4L, which Samsung claims will last four hours, based on BatteryMark tests.

It took 1 hour 53 minutes to discharge.

I present this figure without further comment because I don’t know whether this type of battery takes a few charge/discharge cycles to gain a longer life, or any other possible explanations.