After seeing that Ian’s learning Colemak, I decided to go for it too. Colemak is easier to switch to than Dvorak, and possibly even more efficient to boot.
However, I couldn’t find a keyboard layout that I wanted to print and look at every day. I found a Mac Keyboard Vector with a CC license and made my own tweaks. I condensed the keyboard, and also greyed-out the keys that are unchanged from Qwerty. Download below:
Consider it licensed under the same CC license as above.
I talked about webfonts at the January edition of the Winnipeg WordPress meetup. The slides are not that interesting, particularly out of the context of the presentation, but here you go:
And, here’s the links from the last slide in clickable form:
Update: The Erudite 3.0.2 is now live on WordPress.org.
I’ve already criticized the WordPress.org Theme Review process when it first launched. Things seemed to be improving, but either the team is poorly organized, severely under-powered, or both.
The Erudite 3.0 has been in review for 3 months, 3.0.2 since Sept 28. The review ticket was assigned 5 weeks ago, but still no movement.
If you are savvy enough, download 3.0.2 from the project page. There’s a security issue in the current theme that makes updating a priority. You’ll need to install and activate the Options Framework to change any theme settings.
NOTE: you will lose your previous settings when upgrading. Annoying, I know, but the old settings framework was rickety and awful.
As promised, here’s the follow-up information on my Power Your Portfolio With WordPress presentation that I gave at New Media Manitoba yesterday. I’m grateful that they gave me a chance to present, and doubly grateful that so many people came out on a hot summer night to hear me ramble about nerdy WordPress things.
Firstly, you can grab the theme on GitHub. I’d probably even submit it to the official WordPress.org themes directory, except that it still doesn’t list child themes (it likely will in the future).
Secondly, you can grab the slides on Speaker Deck (or view below). And, if you’re interested in watching me present, there’s the archived livestream video.
Finally, here’s a few useful links from my presentation, and a few others for folks who want to go deeper:
In a stroke of genius, Werner Lemberg has started the ttfautohint project, which repurposes FreeType’s autohinting system to automatically hint TrueType fonts for improved Windows rendering. While no autohinter will be able to match the eye and skills of a manual hinter, ttfautohint provides real world improvements, sometimes dramatically.
For example, I’m working as a contractor on a project using the classic VAG Rounded font. 13px bold looks great in Photoshop comps and Mac browsers, but fails horribly under Windows. I decided to run VAG Rounded Bold through ttfautohint 0.2 to see if it would offer improvements. In short: wow. In the screenshots below, ttfautohint goes head-to-head with the Fontsquirrel generator’s autohinting (which I believe is powered by FontForge).
Rendering modes are shown in the captions. Click for full size. (I’m restricted to screenshots because the font is only licensed for the client site.)
Standard (grayscale)
GDI ClearType
DirectWrite ClearType
As you can see, there’s a dramatic improvement in all 3 Windows rendering environments. 11px-13px sizes move from awful, with completely closed counters, to suprisingly readable. At 14px, the counters open up with standard hinting, but closer inspection reveals other defects such as no separation between the body and dot of the i and j characters. The improvements are even more dramatic under Standard (grayscale) antialiasing, which looks terrible below 18px. Even under DirectWrite ClearType, ttfautohint produces superior results (although a true test would also provide a completely unhinted version to see what the DirectWrite rasterizer is capable of on its own).
The only real downside is a modest file size increase. I haven’t tested across multiple fonts, but in this case our font jumped from 49kb to 63kb. I consider it an excellent trade-off for such improved rendering.
So, you want to use it? Well, first you should support the project. Currently you need to compile ttfautohint, but with our support, Werner will build a GUI version for the command line-phobic. If you’re on a Mac and want to compile, I put together an installation script.
Edit: In an email exchange, Werner pointed out that Dave Crossland—who has done much of the ttfautohint promotion—had the actual idea to use FreeType for hinting, although Werner still deserves massive praise for the execution. Werner also pointed out that VAG Rounded is a good showcase font, and that ttfautohint will not perform such striking results in all circumstances.