design

The Mitr

On almost becoming knowledge/information black hole

Over the years I have accumulated lot of knowledge/information about things which I find interesting. Some of it is obscure some practical. But If you compare what knowledge/information is coming out of it, it is almost negligible. It is all getting stacked up in the wetware of my mind, and it is getting crowded there. There are not many avenues accessible to me right now where such knowledge/information can be given out. And it is not for the lack of trying. Of course there places where such knowledge/information can be added. But I am avoiding contact via the forums where I could be active but I choose not to. I am becoming more reclusive as the time passes and the feel to get validated by others is diminishing.

Another major challenge has been my own procrastination/lethargy and lack of focus and disciplined planning and overarching purpose for such diffuse unconnected morsels of knowledge/information. But that is exactly what it is. The change in focus is so rapid that it is not making beyond the threshold. In an hour I might be reading about Lucy spy ring during second world war, to origins of consciousness, to recent advances in particle physics to concerns about digital-ebook lending to inferential statistics in R to typesetting a peculiarity in LaTeX …. and the list goes on. At other times it is just mindless scrolling of the endless data stream that has become THE feature of our times. This is sync with the Huxelian vision of future, land of plenty for control. Anyone with an internet connection now has more access to knowledge/information than our predecessors just a generation back.

There is more data in the Matrix than we can download.

But for me personally, it is not leading to production as I would have imagined. It is just getting stuck in the proverbial loop, like The Groundhog day, everyday is the same with little variations here and there. It just is not coming out with any sense of accomplishment. Its not that it has been nothing, there have been outputs, but compared to what it should have been it is below minimal. What knowledge/information is coming out is a trickle as compared to the torrents (both literally and figuratively) that are going in. It is like a knowledge/information blackhole, almost nothing seems to come out as

How to make this even? I think the first step, as many more-able peers had advised me during my thesis writing is to keep absolute time for writing and doing things. Also someone had suggested using the Pomodoro method which has helped me in completing deadlines. Perhaps that is what is needed, a bit of discipline and systematic manner in which to channel both the inputs and outputs..

 

The Mitr

On the new “Block Editor” of WordPress

In your life there are some irritating characters. People who irritate you to no end. Maybe its their behavior, body language, or way they speak or dress. They just infuriate you and you cannot tolerate their presence. In case you cannot ask them to effoff, you just get the interaction with them over as soon as possible. Yet they persist.
Similarly, there are software applications which fit in this role of irritating characters. They bug you to do things which it (meaning the software designers) think is the “correct” way. One such crappy piece of software is the new “block editor” of wordpress. It is an application which irritates and interferes in the very process of writing a blog. Maybe there are people who like it, (to each their own). But I personally think the block editor is a cook book of how not to design software. Or Maybe I am too old to make new chic editors work well for me.
Every time it bugs you. Like a cheap salesman trying to sell his shitty wares to you. I am not sure why I can’t use the “classic editor” if I am more comfortable with it. Why is wordpress hell bent shoving this un-user friendly piece of software down to everyone’s posts? The block editor may have its advantages, but not for me.  I prefer simple editor which allows me to focus on the writing instead of a menu popping every now and then which I have to click to dismiss. If I want a block I will call it, I don’t want the editor to push a block between me and my post. Block editor is defective by design in a way.
And there is no way you can turn it off unless you pay. WordPress perhaps knows this, that their editor is trash. Hence only with a hefty upgrade of “business” plan you can get it off your back by installing a “plugin” for classic editor, which should be there by default in the first place. This is akin to ransomware. You pay us or you continue to have shitty, sub-optimal experience with irritating pop-ups. Mind you I am not talking about completely free wordpress installation, it doesn’t even come with “personal” or “premium” plans so even with paid service they don’t want you to have any control over what editor you use.
So my workflow is now, to create a new post in “block editor”, then save a draft, return to the “All posts” and then continue with classic editor. Even then it continuously bugs you if I want to edit in the block editor, if I wanted to I would have, Now since I don’t want, can you please effoff and store this simple request of using classic editor next time?

No it won’t. Aren’t software designers at wordpress capable of understanding this simple request? Or they are doing it willingly to force people to move to their way however irritating and uncomfortable they are?
If wordpress even removes this support for classic editor, I will surely leave this platform and take my blog somewhere else. I was contemplating to leave it this year, but my lethargy prevented me from doing it. But then, lethargy has its limits and and so has patience in dealing with (purposefully) badly designed software applications and processes.
 
 

The Mitr

Forever Free Fonts

There are fonts and there are fonts. One of my earliest recollections of cognising that there are different “fonts” is from a typewritten letter I saw in my childhood (perhaps in the early-mid 90s). Though I didn’t know the term “font” then. Now I had seen typewritten materials earlier, as our exam papers were typewritten. But this said letter was somehow “different”. I didn’t know exactly what was different, but that letter and the typewritten text felt so elegant and aesthetic (again these words I didn’t know then, but trying to reconstruct my feelings from that time) as compared to the other typewritten documents that I had seen. The fact that I still remember that letter implies that it must have had some impact on my mind at that time. After that the printed “text” was never the same. I always tried to “see” the shapes of the text that I would read. Hence I “discovered” that the “fonts” in my school textbooks, and other books are different. I also discovered sans and serif in this way, but didn’t know the terms for them till a few years later. Thus began the journey to look at fonts keenly. Even with my handwriting, I developed 3-4 different scripts. None were cursive. I would play with the slant, then height of the letters, and my fountain pens did play the capable tools. With the computers came in plethora of fonts, more than you could count and keep track of. In the various image editing programmes the fonts achieve prime importance. A good font can make or break a document. It can render something mundane or render it to aesthetic appeal.
A good scientific question to think about is how does our cognitive system recognise that it is the same letter even if it is written in different fonts? Everyone’s handwriting is different even then (if they are legible) we can read and understand what they have written. This would imply that our cognitive system for recognising font faces as particular characters of language must be very very flexible. Any rigidity and we would not communicate. Douglas Hofstadter considers this very question in one of his essays Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity in the Metamagical Themas (an anagram of “Mathematical Games”  by Martin Gardner whose columns Hofstadter replaced) column in Scientific American. The compilation of the columns was later published as a book in 1985.

FIGURE 12-3. 56 As in different styles, all drawn from a recent Letraset catalogue. The names of their respective typefaces are given on the facing page. To native readers of the Latin alphabet, it is an almost immediate visual experience to recognize how any one of them is an ‘A’. No conscious processing is required. A couple of these seem far-fetched, but the rest are quite obvious. The most canonical of all 56 is probably Univers (D-3). Note that no single feature, such as having a pointed top or a horizontal crossbar (or even a crossbar at all!) is reliable. Even being open at the bottom is unreliable. What is going on here? p. 243

Hence we have more and more fonts. Some very legible and some not so much.
Though I never somehow liked Times New Roman or Arial, which arguably might be the most popular fonts in documents (how do you find out the most used font?). Might be because they are default fonts on MS Word. One of my earliest, serious documents that I had to prepare on the computer was the project report of my bachelors programme. I did use MS Word, but the font used was Bookman Old Style. And the document did look different than the rest.

I did have a lot of fonts at that point. I installed all fonts that I could get my hands on. Remember this is early 2000, finding free resources on the internet was not easy, and downloading and getting them to your computer was even a bigger an issue (particularly large files). I owe to Viktor Juliet Papa most of my computer knowledge. Because of his mentoring I could muster guts to take out my HDD to cafe where he was the manager, to get downloaded stuff back. (Again only, portable data transfer devices were 3.5 inch floppy drives with 1.44 MB memory. Good luck with transferring 100s of MBs!, my main disk was 8G for reference) So much to risk, but no risk no gain.
Then in that summer during my internship at the University, I discovered LaTeX. And Computer Modern. It looked sooo elegant compared to TNR or Arial. And it had all the mathematical symbols too. At that point, you had to edit the tex file separately, and then compile it via terminal. It would produce a dvi file, which you would convert to postscript via dvi2ps, and then to pdf via ps2pdf. But it was all worth it! The output was divine compared to plebian MS Word. They say LaTeX doesn’t work well for people who have sold their souls! So my report for masters just two years later was in LaTeX. And I never switched back for most serious documents.

In the earliest days, there were very limited fonts in LaTeX. But with packages like XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX you can use any system fonts in your documents, including non-Roman scripts also. Now there are native packages also which have a variety of fonts. So in my PhD I used Linux Libertine as the main font and associated Linux Biolinum as the Sans font. Wikipedia logo uses Linux Libertine.
 

Now with libertinus package you can use it with pdfLaTeX, no need to use XeLaTeX/LuaLaTeX (though some might find this step regressive). The font  comes with full math support, so that you can write the documents seamlessly.

 
Another nice set of fonts with full math support are kpfonts. Though I do not personally like the default sans that is bundled with it.

And one of the more elegant math fonts is urw-garamond, garamondx with mathdesign. Though this set has licensing restrictions that you may not like.

A sans math variant, that I have used occasionally is the GFS Neohellenic from the Greek Font Society.

These days for most of my Office documents (including google docs) I use EB Garamond for serif. It is too good.

And Quattracento Sans. For monofonts, particularly to be used in text editors (Emacs, I still use Linux Biolinum

in TeXShop I use Average Mono.

Some of the other sans fonts that I do use often are
GeoSans Light, Comfortaa and Josefin Sans.
For fixed width fonts, Latin Modern and Inconsolata, TeX Gyre Cursor are used. See the programming fonts in the list below

 
For handwriting effect there are several nice fonts that I have used. The best ones are Purisa, Comili

Amatic SC is a very elegant font for titles

New fonts will be continually developed. And for me fonts being free  (as in freedom) is the most significant aspect. Given this there is a large number of fonts which have been released under GPL, OFL and similar open licenses. Fonts released GPL license come with the font exception. Below is a partial list of free (as in freedom) fonts which you can browse to get the font for your needs (though some might have non-free content). The listing is alphabetical
Arkandis Digital Foundry  Not updated since 2015, but has nice fonts

Font Library (a largish list of Free Fonts with various licenses)

Google Fonts  Several nice fonts, in different scripts too.

LaTeX Font Catalog contains OTF and TTF files as well, my go to site for choosing LaTeX fonts
 
 

Lesser Known Programming Fonts
Programming Fonts (check individual licenses)
Let me know any other links to font databases which have free (as in freedom) fonts.
Happy typesetting!