HN user
Fonts, data viz, front-end, design.
https://www.s-ings.com/
I find this idea of getting in early interesting, because it is completely novel to me. Is it common for people to derive so much pleasure from voting for something before it gathers momentum? You really lean into this idea, likening it to winning a jackpot, so I assume it is at least somewhat widespread.
Being unscientific, societies veil deficient idiocies, reifying their weird, counterfeit policies.
I agree. I occasionally turn to them to see if they work in a new setting, but find they never expose the features of a grid I would find useful. Everything must be manually placed, rather than allowing content to intelligently snap to multiple axes. Possibly I never have grasped some fundamental concept, possibly they are not suited to the sorts of layouts I usually work on. But more and more I feel they are designed to fulfil some purpose orthogonal to what I would need them to do.
I was looking at Marko a few years ago because of the concise syntax. I have always thought highly of Pug and would have loved a framework that integrated that sort of elegant, minimal syntax. Unfortunately, Marko doesn’t even get the syntax highlighting right in its own docs for this style.
The example on that page with leading commas to separate tag attributes, and a number of other choices across the framework are also a turn off for me personally.
I’ve mostly been using Svelte for the past half-decade instead but still hope for something more elegant to come along.
What is remarkable is the frequency with which I’ve heard so-called subject matter experts do this on podcasts. It seems to me a very effective way to communicate your lack of any such expertise.
Preview is genuinely very good, but it doesn’t handle annotations made in Acrobat very well. When navigating between annotations, they can become stuck open in Preview, and it is not possible to view insertions.
Whether that is the fault of Acrobat or Preview, I’m not sure. Unfortunately, though, it means I frequently need to move across to Acrobat when addressing edits that someone has marked up in that software. And that acts as a constant reminder of how sluggish, awkward and nagging Acrobat can be. Even quitting the app is slow!
This thread also makes me think of Susan Sontag’s essay On Style.
I suppose that would make those employing Boustrophedon ambidextrous?
Agree that it seems like a pretty steep jump for my use cases too.
Makes it clear how generous their free tier has been. Comparing the current free plan to the incoming one, as an example: - Unlimited deploys vs 10-15? - 100GB bandwidth vs 1? - Unlimited requests vs 100K?
I have a mixture of paid and personal use, but will be looking around for something with fewer features and a simpler cost structure. Static hosting is the only real feature that's required for a lot of my projects, and the other niceties are completely non-essential.
I have found Netlify to be a great product so far, though.
Not to mention the two-em-dash (U+2E3A) and three-em-dash (U+2E3B).
Another category, searchable interfaces, may fit into one of these or may be it’s own separate category. But tools like MacOS Spotlight or the command palette in some editors are very useful for power users. Having every command available through a minimal set of fuzzy keyboard strokes is a significant productivity boost, while also allowing some degree of discoverability.
As an aside, if anyone at Adobe is reading this, this sort of tool would be an excellent addition to Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. InDesign already has something like it, although that implementation leaves a little to be desired.
Love the idea but today’s was not a good one.
As a metric user, this is an interesting point that I haven’t heard before, and I think the other responses don’t really engage with it. Yes, familiarity means this isn’t much of a daily problem – you just use divisions of the unit that are most appropriate. But the size of the base units for volume, mass and length don’t really match up well from a human day-to-day perspective.
Wouldn’t it be nicer if a litre, a gram and a cubic metre of water were equal, rather than 1 cubic metre, 1000 litres, 1,000,000 grams?
Side note that in Europe drinking products are often labelled in centilitres whereas Australians use millilitres. I wonder whether this indicates some difference in the way the two groups think about volume, or maybe it is just the fallout of some other constraint, like translations limiting the space available.
Still, the ergonomics seem to be on the side of Metric, taking into account the ease of conversion between units when all are base ten.
Without meaning to high-jack this thread, you can do Base64 decoding here. Also no ads, 100% client-side, and no AI. But no string auto-detection either! https://www.takeymakey.com/convert/code/decode-base64/
I suppose there is no hard requirement for consistent saturation between hues, but that seems a bit inconsistent to my tastes. Darker yellow and orange colours seem a little too washed out.
Overall I like the total palette though. Especially the avoidance of “red” red, which is a colour I think many designers dislike. I would love to see a study on colour preferences in relation to eye colour.
In the same vein, but with more hues… https://www.s-ings.com/scratchpad/oklch-smooth/
Knowing which font is used with a hundred percent certainty, maybe not. This probably is something more people should be aware of. But the failure mode might be some slightly awkward line breaks, assuming you allow for the edge case of alternative fonts. And even when the calculation isn’t a perfect representation of the rendered reality, the approximate width is still more useful for layout purposes than going in blind.
Combined with em-based sizing I’ve found this to be pretty robust. Just because you can’t make it perfect for all users doesn't mean you can’t do the work to improve it for many.
I’ve been using a similar technique to display our poll data[1] for several years, although without using grid. If you can measure the text because you know which font will be used, and store the widths of various characters, you can take a little more control over layout too, even while rendering server-side.
I also started writing a simple responsive SVG charting library[2], but the author is right in that there are some fluid layouts that are just impossible to realise with SVG at the moment.
[1] https://poll.lowyinstitute.org/report/2024/global-powers-and...
I made a little platform to house some of my simple tools. It is part REPL, part form-builder. All tools run on the client, which constrains what is possible, but still proves useful for many basic applications.
For example, convert Word to Markdown… https://www.takeymakey.com/convert/files/word-to-markdown/
Or this quick anagram checker… https://www.takeymakey.com/calculate/text/anagram-checker/
It is limited and depends on the browser used to print the document. The most glaring missing feature is CMYK colour.
I’ve just set up our publications to use PagedJS, and with a fair amount of hacking I was able to set up a baseline grid. Hyphenation depends on the browser implementation, which is OK for English in recent Chromium. The new text-wrap property has also been helpful. Hanging punctuation is only supported in Safari if I remember correctly.
But being able to produce nice looking PDFs from a markdown document, with automated endnotes and table of contents, is a much nicer process than going through InDesign, and I also say this as someone equally comfortable with both. And the result is good enough for our purposes.
Here is an example: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/LA...
Reddit has been using these fonts internally for a few years in their marketing. They were not available to the public. They have been made available this week, hence the announcement. (The Github repo was made public a few weeks ago in preparation for adding them to the Google Fonts service.)
It's a shame, because I thought font snobbery might encourage some interesting discussion here.
But on your second point -- there are two lowercase "l" glyphs, of which the default option is not purely rectangular. Without any stylistic set activated, "1Iil" are all visually distinct.
The large size is due to the number of glyphs and alternate styles. If you want a smaller footprint, I'd suggest subsetting the font as needed.
There are also 6 ready-made subsets[1], each about 15kb, matching these unicode ranges. These are set up to work with the @font-face unicode-range property[2].
A: U+0020-00BF
B: U+00C0-00FF
C: U+0100-01FF
D: U+0200-0FFF
E: U+1000-1FFF
F: U+2000-FFFF
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/...
There is some work to do still[1], but a variable version will probably be available once the fonts are released on the Google Fonts service.
I wish it could have been more science than art, but it wasn’t
There is this tendency towards scientism in digital colour theory, which sticks out because I noticed myself doing it in a related project. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but don’t forget that the science is trying to measure our perception. I don’t think we should be overly concerned if we sometimes rely more on our actual perception than an attempt to measure it.
Those gymnasts remind me of some of my favourite pangrams…
Bouncy squad eking prize with pelvic flexion jump.
My Fox News TV quip? Big jerks add zilch!
View half a dozen squid & peg just six inky crumbs.
The separate page on punctuation is interesting. They recommend against using curly apostrophes, although they do not give a rationale for this choice.
That page doesn’t follow its own advice. It recommends against contracting “you have”, but goes on to do so later in the page. Contradictions are always a bit funny on a style guide because of the imperative voice.
This raster image must then be placed into vector software capable of performing a bitmap trace, such as Adobe Illustrator, or Inkscape.
It seems like it doesn’t actually create a vector image by itself, which is what the title had me hoping. I’d be interested to see a process that links up these two parts of the problem.
This online survey from UWMadison came up the other day, which estimates where you sit on the bell curve in terms of internal verbalisation.
https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...
Finnair serves blueberry/blåbär juice on its flights.
I definitely agree that soft hyphens are a simplistic workaround if used in the way I suggested, and are indeed inferior to a complex and well-thought out hyphenation system. Still, if someone is considering `word-wrap: break-word;` for narrow table columns, soft hyphens are worth knowing about.