Blog

  • Stop using px as a measurement

    The size of a pixel is relative to its output device, aka screen resolution.

    Some screens are 72 dpi. Some are 300 dpi. So if you specify your font size to be 12px, it should rightly appear legible on the 72 dpi screen, and tiny on the 300 dpi screen.

    Instead, use point, or pt. A point is 1/72 of an inch. 12pt will appear legible on any screen, regardless of its dpi.

  • WP Icon font

    WP Icon font

    I made a font out of the icons I’m proposing for future versions of WordPress. Here’s how I did it:

    Designed them in AI CS6. Preferences set like this:

    File handling preferences in AI
    Note the copy as settings; apparently you need this so you can copy/paste into fontlab…

    AI preferences
    Gridline every 10px, w/10 subdivisions. Icons are based on a 10×10 grid. I made the color black so they’re easy to see.

     

    snap settings
    Make sure snap to grid and snap to point are turned on, and that you can see the grid.

    Close up of a couple icons
    Note the extra strokeless/fill-less 20x20px box around the icons. You need this to copy/paste into fontlab and not have them get scaled up.

     

    Then I created a new font in Fontlab 5, with metrics set like this:

    fontlab metrics Screen Shot 2013-02-06 at 9.02.30 AM

    I copy/pasted each icon-the shape and the invisible bounding box- into a separate  glyph in fontlab. I tried to make it intuitive; “a” is appearance, “d” for dashboard. “p” was problematic; posts, pages both have p.

    After I generated the otf file, I used @font-face to embed it on a test page. I set a base size to 62.5% and set the icons to 2.0em; effectively rendering them at their native 20×20 pixels. The key thing is the -webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased property in the css. Without it, they look like garbage. They pretty much look like garbage anyway in firefox/opera, and I have no clue how to get them in IE. But in webkit it’s gold.

    I’m trying to get the whole thing on github since I guess that’s what you’re supposed to do, so stay tuned…

     

     

  • The English Beat at Ironworks

    Great show. Loved the sax, and seeing it live made me realize how hard it is to pull off solos like they did in the 80s. Not enough people there, which is a shame. We’re lucky they keep coming back and should support one of the most notable, iconic sounds out of that era.

  • The mccondo

    I’m at the ft Erie town meeting and 2 hours into it were hearing the same pro-condo heads go on and on. Were all in agreement on this point- the town needs more people, more business.
    The people you’re gonna get are not what you want. You want people to fix the cottages and build new ones. Most are gonna be summer residents. Sorry, anyone who thinks CB is gonna turn into year round destination is nuts. We need to maximize what we have.

  • Themeitis

    Why does everything have to be a theme?

  • Looking for the ultimate makhani sauce recipe

    I seriously believe Makhani sauce is the best stuff you can eat on this planet. But it is incredibly hard to make. At least, that’s been my impression to date. I spent an afternoon constructing something verbatum from some website, and it sucked so bad I tossed the entire batch.

    So I’m done trying to make it. Anyone know where I can buy a TUB of the stuff??

  • Textwrangler 3 released

    My favorite text editor just got updated. Woopee!