In the late 1970s, Digital Equipment Corporation produced a set of manuals for their terminal and printer equipment that I think are unmistakably of their decade, with simple line designs in browns and oranges. I’ve always loved the simplicity of these designs, so during the first pandemic lockdown, I decided to spend some time with Inkscape, recreating the covers, without the scratches, fading and curling edges that my physical manuals had accumulated over the past 40 years.

Over lockdown, I was revisiting some old projects and taking the opportunity to see if they would benefit from a fresh pair of eyes and new learning over the last decade. Manx was one such; a catalogue of old computer manuals that I created 20 years ago and worked on until 2009, at which point some major changes in my life meant I could no longer sustain the effort to maintain what had always been a single person task.

Notes on adding the Codeberg link to my site, built with Hugo. The Ananke theme doesn’t (yet) include Codeberg, so I downloaded the black and white Codeberg logo and placed this in themes/​ananke/​assets/​ananke/​socials/​codeberg.svg. There are two apparent problems with this logo though: Default logo is whiter than other social icons Link says “Codeberg logo” on hover I can fix (2) by removing <title> element from svg. But this doesn’t fix (1).

I was upgrading the images of the VT100 Special Graphics character set used in my online transcripts of the manuals today and I wondered about the VT52 equivalents, which are not shown graphically in any of the manuals that I could find; only the descriptions exist.

I would like to determine exactly when the books with floral covers were produced by the Edinburgh publishers Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier between about 1880 and 1900.

I’ve been acquiring books that were produced by the Edinburgh publishers Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier between about 1880 and 1900. Specifically, I’ve been looking at their floral covers, because something very interesting seems to have happened around about 1890.

I have an old manual that I’d like to convert to PDF. Most of the documents I scan are just black and white. However, this one has a lot of pictures with blue highlights, and table backgrounds in the same blue and I’d like to preserve that limited use of colour without keeping every page in full colour. It strikes me that I should be able to do that by separating layers for each colour used, and overlaying them to make a neat PDF.

After preparing ebooks for years with HTML and getting frustrated with a morass of divs and spans with classes, I’ve decided to experiment with preparing texts in the vocabulary of the Text Encoding Initiative. Conversion to XHTML for web, EPUB and Kindle formats will be taken care of by some scripts, which may be XSLT later, but for now are Perl scripts.

I am considering working on the PANOSE font matching part of Fontmatrix because I enjoy playing with Fontmatrix, but its idea of how PANOSE’s individual facets1 are named or work seems to me to be a bit wonky. For instance, it only understands the names for Latin Text facets, and uses them even for Latin Decorative or Pictorial fonts. The first step (apart from trying to persuade my one-year-old son to go to sleep long enough for me to even turn on the computer), is to take a look at whether improved matching or re-classifying facilities would do any good at all, and for that, I need to take a look at font classifications in the wild.

While working on the Kindle (Mobi) version of Antigua and the Antiguans, I found that I was spending too much time attempting to carefully craft some XHTML markup and a stylesheet that would get the final book to look the way I expected it to. Because the Mobi format is only HTML 3.2 with a few extra elements, and no stylesheet support at all, Kindlegen has to do a lot of wizardry to down-convert any EPUB (XHTML + CSS) you are starting with, and the results don’t appear to be consistent across an entire book.