I am a computer scientist. I went to university to learn how to be a computer scientist. Some of the classes I took were named things like “data structures” “FORTRAN IV” “Assembly” and “Compilers”.

I’ve written three compilers, around four or five different interpreters, studied and understand bit manipulation.

I’ve done bit fiddling on a panel of switches to boot a computer.

With all of that, I’m a noob compared to Donald Knuth. This guy wrote the book, literally, on computer science. The Art of Computer Programming is that book.

What is more amazing than writing that book, is how that book came to exist. I’m telling this from memory, so I might get some details wrong.

At the time, the cost of publishing textbooks was high. If you wanted to drive the price up, just add a math formula to your textbook.

That little bit of math could add hundreds of dollars to the cost of making a textbook. Worse, it was typeset manually by people that might not get it right.

Donald didn’t like that. So he decided to just write some software to do it for him. But first, he needed to follow the concepts.

That concept is what we now call “write once”. You don’t define something in two different places. You define it once, and everything is built from that single source.

He wanted to write a program to typeset books that was self documenting and “did the right thing”. So he invented a new language, called “web”. He now needed a program to convert “web” files into something that a computer would understand.

He wrote “tangle”. Tangle takes a .web file and produces a PASCAL file (programming language) and a .tex file. The pascal program that was created can then read the .tex file and produce a typeset book, ready to print.

Donald taught himself typesetting. His programs and books taught me programming.

Donald needed to typeset and then print the book. To typeset the book, he needed to know the fonts that were being used and more than that, he had to know how each glyph in the font was positioned within a rectangle.

So as an example, consider the word “fit”. This word has three characters, but when printed in a professional font, the “fi” characters are combined into a single glyph that looks great to the eye.

Donald went out to get a professional font. Nobody would sell it to him for reasons. So… Donald learned how to create fonts. He invented an entirely new way of describing fonts. And wrote another book in “.web” to create metafont.

The fonts we use today are TrueType Fonts or derivatives of that format. TrueType fonts are based on the metafont format.

This is where I became interested in typesetting and fonts. I learned more than a little bit, and I’m still a noob about it.

Fonts have a purpose. Each font is designed for a particular purpose. For that purpose, they should do a good job.

There are “display” fonts and “text” fonts. Display fonts are used for big things, like headlines. Text fonts are for reading things.

If you look at the characters closely, you might notice that some characters have little “feet” or flourishes on them.

You should see the base on the bottom of the “q”. It has a sort of rounding to it. It flows nicely. These are “serifs”.

This font is based on URW’s New Century SchoolBook font. It is one of the most common fonts used in books. It is an easy-to-read font when you are looking at a wall of text.

When it is enlarged, like the image above, that readability is not as good. When we are using large characters, such as in a banner or headline, we want to use a “sans serif” font. A font without serifs.

The most famous of those is Helvetica. This is owned by Adobe. Microsoft created their version of Helvetica, called “Arial”. There are free versions that look nearly the same.

The default font that this site uses is a sans serif.

As I said the other day, I’m writing software to help with teaching English as a Second Language. We are using some texts designed for different levels. I need to be able to display text in a video meeting that was easy for my students to read.

So I picked one of the ugliest fonts I’ve ever found.

It just looks wrong. It looks like it is melted, it doesn’t have weight in any one direction. Sometimes a stroke is heavy on the left, sometimes on both sides. It is just wrong.

But its purpose is not to be beautiful. Its purpose is to be easy to read. It is.

The font is called “OpenDyslexic”. It is designed to help combat the issues of dyslexia. Since I have dyslexia, I should use it more often. I don’t.

The interesting thing is that all of my students using it were thrilled with it. They found it very readable.

Better still, my wife, the reading specialist, loves it. She loves it enough that she is going to get it installed at her school for her to use with her students.

It was a big week at the Supreme Court. The Court heard its second Second Amendment case in a year. The odds say we should get the opinion sometime around June 2024.

The left is going on about how this will be a slam dunk win for the state and gun infringers everywhere. MSNBC went so far as to say that the conservative court was retreating from Bruen because Bruen was so untenable.

There is very little chance that Bruen will be reversed. Bruen was a slap down of the inferior courts for not doing Heller correctly. What is possible is that we get an opinion that says that a person who is dangerous to himself or others can be disarmed. If that happens, I expect that the court will also specify precisely how a person is judged to be “dangerous”.

Furthermore, the Court may find that there is no history of disarming a person without due process and vacates §922(g)(8).

Of course, the Court could just vacate the Fifth Circuit court’s opinion and remand it with instructions on how to do it “right”.

Regardless, I’m not concerned about the outcome of this case. It will either be a win for The People or an extremely limited opinion. Meanwhile, the state has admitted that the criteria is “dangerous” which might mean that §922(g) gets gutted when the Range case is heard.

I recently picked up a WWII IFAK pouch to go with my WWII web gear for pistol carry. It is barely big enough for an Israeli Combat Bandage or a SWAT-T tourniquet. I’m trying to decide which is the better to have with me all the time.

I’m leaning towards the Israeli Combat Bandage.

On an interesting note, I’ve complained to Hagar that she gets much better engagement on her articles than I do on mine. I spend 3 or 4 hours writing an analysis of a case, and I’m lucky if I get 2 comments. She whips off an article in 30 minutes and has 10+ comments.

She pointed out that my non-legal articles get more feedback.

Yesterday’s rant about some moron thinking he had discovered “The Loophole” had good feedback. It felt nice.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

We look forward to your comments.

One of my clients has a strong base of developers out of his home country. His people are very sharp, very good. They deliver excellent results. If you ever need Drupal developers, I’ll put you in touch with him.

His company works with some of the best educational institutions in the country, delivering top-notch results.

He noticed that some of his developers were having issues with the pronouncing certain words. So at a company-wide meeting, he had a vocabulary list to review. I stepped in it and took over and taught that vocabulary list to the team.

The next meeting, we did a group reading. Again, to build vocabulary and comfort.

This morphed into me teaching multiple session per week of one-on-one lessons.

One minor issue with this is that I want to do it “right”. I went to my wife, a reading specialist, and asked her how to do it better.

She told me.

I looked at how she did it and what she did. Which led me to trying to do it myself.

I am NOT willing to spend two hours in prep to produce the training aids I want.

So, of course, I’m writing software. I’ll spend 120 man-hours building software, so I don’t have to do 20 hours of work.

Sigh.

I’m having a blast doing the lessons, and I am eagerly awaiting the four sessions I’m teaching tomorrow.