There she goes again...scanning and assigning SAN attached storage as my first devices causing my mounting to "hork" and my partitions to be wrongly assigned....Will it ever end?

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• HP Pavilion tx2000 series [2]
  
• HP Pavilion tx2100 series [2]
  
• HP Pavilion tx2500 series [1]
  
• generic Wacom USB TabletPC (added touch device to existing entry) [3]
  

Obviously we need fonts to communicate with each other, especially in digital media. A whole industry create thousends of fonts for different task: for books, magazines, headlines, comics, funerals, weddings, and much, much more.

However, these fonts are not free and as such cost money. Unfortunately, in the past there was a lack of good looking, professional fonts. The situation nowadays are getter better and better as we have very promising open source fonts: DejaVu, Gentium, LinuxLibertine, to name a few. Without these, our world of characters would be very small and we would have a limited choice only. It’s a pity that all these beautiful fonts don’t have a condensed monospace version. This would be very useful, for example you can have more characters on a line and you don’t have to break them into pieces.

As I haven’t found a suitable font for me, I thought why not create one? Of course, I could have used one of the above, apply some transformations and be happy (or not). But this is not really creative, so I thought why not design something totally new? So I have chosen this project for Hackweek.

Let’s make it clear: It is really hard and nobody really know the time and sweat that goes into a font. To create a really good looking font it is really a challenge—and obviously not possible during Hackweek. But I think, to create something new and gain some experience, this can be a lot of fun.

So here is the rough procedure that I used for this font:

1. Draw some sketches
2. Scan it with a scanner
3. Import the image into Fontforge into the background
4. Rescale the image
5. (Re)draw manually the lines, straight and curved. You could try to use a tool that automates this task, but the results were not very satisfying.
6. Expand the lines and make the “flesh” of the glyph.
7. Remove any overlaps
8. Adjust the width, curve, etc.
9. Make a print out, look at it, and repeat some of the steps…

As I learn more and more of FontForge, these tasks become (hopefully) easier. The font is similar to Dejavu Mono, but not identical. The result of all these steps is shown in this graphic (be warned, obscure text ahead):

As you can see I have drawn the majuscules only. I will try to implement the minuscles and other characters too, at the latest of the next Hackweek.

Funny, but jimmac is working also on a font too. Good luck to you!

I will publish the font when I think it is in a somehow useful state. It will be released under an open source license (probably Open Font License or GPL, I don’t know yet).

Feedback welcome!

This week is Novell’s annual Hack Week, where Novell developers and the openSUSE community have free reign to work on whatever open source projects and ideas they are most interested in. Participants can submit their project ideas at ideas.opensuse.org. Prizes are awarded for Best Overall Project, Best Cross-Pollination Team, and First Penguin (project that went out on a limb to try something difficult and risky? and probably failed. Named in honor of the first penguin to jump into the water when there may be predators swimming below.)

On the openSUSE news blog, Novell openSUSE Community Manager Joe ?Zonker? Brockmeier gives a good description of the week’s activities, how to get involved at the Utah Open Source Conference, and some of the exciting projects from previous Hack Weeks.

In an age where the Unix shell is more relevant every passing minute, we need to have proper command line editing tools everywhere.

For a project of mine, this weekend I put together a command-line editing class for .NET shell applications. The Mono.Terminal.LineEdit class can be used by shell applications to get readline-like capabilities without depending on any external C libraries.

To use it, just do:

	using Mono.Terminal;

	LineEditor le = new LineEditor ("MyApp");
	while ((s = le.Edit ("prompt> ", "")) != null)
		Console.WriteLine ("You typed: " + s);
	
	

It supports the regular cursor editing, Emacs-like editing commands, history, incremental search in the history as well as history loading and saving.

The code is self-contained, and can be easily reused outside of my project. To use it, you just need to include the getline.cs file in your project. This is built on top of System.Console, so it does not have external library dependencies and will work on both Mono and .NET (finally bringing joy to people using command-line applications that use Console.ReadLine).

It is licensed under the MIT X11 license and the Apache 2.0 license so there are no annoying licensing issues and can be mixed with anything out there.

I could have sworn that “a couple” meant two. I think he’s just focused elsewhere - his last day here is tomorrow.