ChapterZero

I’m reading a practical introduction to typography at the FreeType website. It covers all the basics of font terminology needed to use FreeType, along with simple algorithms for rendering text. I used to be into typography, so I’m familiar with some of the concepts, but it also has some interesting information that I never came across before. For instance, most word processors base their layout on the resolution of the printer you’re using, so if you go from one printer to another, the layout of the document may change drastically— this is why a Word document can increase in size when you write it one place and print it another. That’s something I never really considered before, even though I have noticed it, and occasionally been annoyed. Adobe Acrobat is of course immune to this problem, because it computes its font metrics separately.

On further consideration, it looks like I’m going to have to write the layout algorithms for the notebook interface myself: I can’t think of a noncompromising way to enhance any text widgets so they can handle math properly, and simply embedding special widgets won’t work.