Archive for Envy-Code-R tag
From the vaults of Twitter
I don’t normally republish my Tweets but are my highlights.
damienguard:
Methods returning "this" is a hack for fluency. Let’s get ".." added to the C# compiler to operate on previous object. a.This()..That()lazycoder:
@damienguard I can’t decide if that’s genius or insanity. Should we add the "~" operator to refer back to the top of the inherit. chain? ;)
LostInTangent:
@damienguard I’ve started using Envy Code R for most of my applications (not just VS) and I have to say I’m loving it.damienguard:
@LostInTangent: Envy Code R PR8 soon – Greek chars, improved hinting and some glyph revisions subscript/fractions & *96 redone.
damienguard:
Statically typed languages are not flexible enough to develop dynamically linked libraries.
damienguard:
Renaming your wifi router StupidRouter does not alas shame it into being more reliable.
damienguard:
@command_tab: Am I the only one who finds paying for pretty UI’s to leverage free software that took much more effort to develop offensive?
damienguard:
Just took delivery on my Alps-switched keyboard… feels good so far… but let’s see if co-workers complain about the noise.Plip:
@damienguard I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF THINK FOR THAT INFERNAL CLICKING !damienguard:
@lancefisher The alps keyboard was from DSI USA… but don’t order one, terrible 2-key limits prevent fast typing.
damienguard:
Apple should add hobbyist to its OS X line-up. Make kernel easier to switch, remove the h/w lockdown and no support.
damienguard:
Standard windows font smoothing’s real problem is lack of scales. Convert a ClearType rendering to greyscale in Photoshop…
[)amien
Envy Code R preview #7 (scalable coding font)
It’s been a struggle but finally after countless hours here it is, the next release of my Envy Code R monospaced (fixed-width) font designed for programmers.
Many glyphs have been redrawn since preview #6 including braces, lower-case y, 6 & 9, ampersand, dollar-sign, hash etc. One pixel was removed vertically height to make the box drawing balanced and allow more lines per screen.
These new box-drawing, shading and symbols make Envy Code R a great font for the command-prompt (Consolas and Lucida Console lack box-drawing completely). To use them you will need to run the included registry file and reboot to operate correctly from a command prompt’s properties dialog.
This typeface contains over 550 glyphs providing full complements for DOS, Windows and Mac versions of the US, Western, Central Europe, Turkish, Baltic, Icelandic and Nordic code-pages. This hits several Unicode ranges including Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended A & B, Box Drawing, Block Elements, Letterlike Symbols, Number Forms, Arrows… although not all of these ranges are complete yet.
As well as regular and bold variants this version includes a full italic version too and the obligatory italic-as-bold hack to get italic syntax highlighting in Visual Studio as shown here in my favourite 10 point with my Humane theme.
And for those of you that like the font a little larger it now looks good and the odd sizing issues are all gone!
Okay, enough with the teasing, you’ve waited far too long…
Download Envy Code R Preview #7.2 (TrueType) (169 KB)
These files are free to download and use from damieng.com but CAN NOT be redistributed either by other web sites or be included in your package, download, product or source repository at this time.
[)amien
May 2008 checkpoint
I am now settled into my new, albeit temporary, apartment here in Vancouver, BC working for Microsoft!
Joining Microsoft
For those who haven’t been following my blog long I took a job at Microsoft Canada Development Centre as a developer on LINQ to SQL. It turns out my H-1B Visa has been approved and I will be moving down to Redmond in October.
Joining a company of Microsoft’s size is a daunting experience. The sheer number of people, departments, systems, procedures and intranet sites to navigate and learn plus of course the actual job of jumping into the product and seeing where we go from here. I’ve also been helping out a little on the forums and internal lists and getting involved in the regular scheduled update meetings.
Of course you also hear all sorts of interesting news just before it becomes public knowledge such as publishing XNA apps to Xbox Live! and Office getting ODF and PDF support.
On the personal front…
A whirlwind couple of weeks full of new employee orientation, relocating, getting lost, filling in forms, exploring, meeting a couple of hundred people and catching up with a few old friends including one from Guernsey all of which lead to a quiet blog.
There have been some personal stories of getting lost, baby sharks and falling in lakes which will be kept to email now – there’s no way those 500+ subscribers are here for my personal bits! I’ll be sending out an email this week so if you haven’t seen something by the weekend and we’re friends ping me and I’ll forward you on a copy.
Some photos are up on Facebook with a few more to follow.
Envy Code R
Of course what everybody really wants to know (according to my inbox) is where Envy Code R preview #7 is.
It is coming, but every time I think I’m close to a release I find another annoying glitch all related to hinting.
Hinting is the process whereby you tell the rendering system how to shape the characters to better fit into a pixel grid. It consists of a table saying at which sizes to smooth and apply instruction plus a program that adjusts the font as a whole for a given size and then a program per-glyph that tells it how to adjust the points in relation to each other with delta hints providing modifications for specific point sizes.
It’s a complicated process if you’re doing it at the lowest level with a tool such as Microsoft’s Visual TrueType but is made easier with a tool like FontLab Studio 5 which has an autohinter that often gets things wrong but is a lot easier to work with and works with hints at a higher level of abstraction.
Which is why I parted with $999 on FontLab and I’m going to investigate a donate option to try and recoup some of those costs.
The bold variant is the only one now requiring hinting and I’m hoping to have it done in the next 24-48 hours. The regular variant looks just great… as does italics.
[)amien
More screen-shots of Envy Code R preview #7
Work on my Envy Code R programming font has resumed and I’ve spent hours playing with the hinting process to ensure it looks good at sizes above and below 10 point:
These look great – even more so when you consider there are no embedded bitmaps and very few delta hints.
There is still a lot of work to do – all the foreign characters, symbols and box-drawing characters (another 600 glyphs) require hinting and I should test it on the Mac, Java and Flash font rendering engines to make sure there are no show-stoppers there.
Preview 7 will consist of of just a plain style regular and bold because I need to get this out – it’s been too long since the last release. Preview 8 will add back italics and the Visual Studio italics-as-bold hack shortly afterwards.
Check out Talios’s shots using Java/Linux and Eddy Young’s shots in NetBeans.
A newer version of Envy Code R is available.
[)amien
Getting the hint (Where is Envy Code R?)
I know, I said there would be a good chance that the next version of Envy Code R would be out this weekend but the annoying sizing, thickness and cropping issues that came up at some sizes above and below the optimum 10 point were really annoying me.
Many articles later, some playing around with Microsoft Visual TrueType and much frustration and experimentation later I think I’m on the right path.
Here is how Envy Code R is looking on Windows right now with standard font smoothing.
ClearType doesn’t look as good and I’m still learning the black art and the implications of each type of hinting instruction.
Strangely, these hints seem to be ignored on the Mac which is still rendering everything a little too thick especially on curves. Perhaps that is why so many developers create a Mac-specific version?
Once I’m happy with how the regular version works I’ll put it online for download and then whip the bold and italic variants in to shape and any feedback into regular for the proper 0.7 release.
A newer version of Envy Code R is available.
[)amien