For your listening pleasure, here’s tonight’s podcast, with a bit behind the scenes on my first appearance on RNZ’s The Panel as a panellist, and ‘I’ve Been Thinking’ delivered at a more appropriate pace, without me staring at the clock rushing to finish it before the pips for the 4 p.m. news.
Archive for August 2020
Podcast for tonight: behind the scenes on The Panel
28.08.2020Tags: 1970s, 2020, Aotearoa, Big Tech, China, Facebook, family, history, Hong Kong, Mary Chapman, media, New Zealand, podcast, radio, Radio New Zealand, Ted Knight, TV, Wallace Chapman, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in China, culture, Hong Kong, media, New Zealand, TV, Wellington | No Comments »
How to delete Windows 10 system fonts for real, not just remove registry references to them
13.08.2020My last post implied that I ego-surfed and found a Wikipedia chat entry about me, but thatâs not the case. I was searching for information on how to remove a system-protected font from Windows 10, and seeing as I often post solutions to obscure technical issues on here, I had hoped I recorded my how-to last time. The libel posted by some Australian Wikipedia editor came up during that search.
Once upon a time, Microsoft didnât care if you removed system fonts, but at some point, it began protecting Arial, whose design, for reasons Iâve gone into elsewhere, Iâve always considered compromised. There was one stage where you could replace Arial with something else called Arial, and as I had a licence for a very, very old Agfa version of Helvetica (do people remember CG Triumvirate?!), I decided to modify its file name to fool Windows into thinking all was well.
The last time Windows did an updateâversion 1909âI had to resort to a safe-mode boot and taking control of the font files as admin, but I really could not remember the specifics. The problem is that when you install the ânewâ Arial, the existing roman one is used by quite a few applications, and you donât really replace itâyour only solution is to delete it.
With version 2004, safe mode is quite different, and the command prompt and Powershell commands I knew just didnât cut it. I realize the usual solution is to go into the registry keysâIâve used this one for a long, long timeâand to remove or modify the references to the offending fonts at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts. Iâve also used the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes key to make sure that Helvetica does not map on to Arial (in fact, I make sure Arial maps on to Helvetica). Neither actually works in this case; they are ignored, even bypassed by certain programs. And, really, neither deletes the file; they just attempt to have Windows not load them, something which, as I discovered, doesnât prevent Windows from loading them.
By all means, use these methods, but be prepared for the exception where it doesnât work. The claim that the methods âdeleteâ the fonts is actually untrue: they remain in C:\Windows\Fonts.
The other methods that do not work are altering the equivalent keys under WOW6432node (which get intercepted and directed from the 32-bit keys anyway), using an elevated command prompt to delete the files (at least not initially), or doing the same from safe mode (which is very different now, as safe mode is in the same resolution and the Windows\Fonts folder displays as it does in the regular modeâso you cannot see the files you have to remove). You cannot take ownership of the font files through an elevated Powershell (errors result), nor can you do this from safe mode. Nothing happens if you delete FNTCACHE.DAT from the system32 directory, and nothing happens if you delete ~fontcache files from the Local directory.
What was interesting was what kept calling arial.ttf in the fontsâ directory even after âmyâ Arial was loaded up. The imposter Arial loaded in most programs, but for the Chromium-based browsers (Vivaldi, Edge), somehow these knew to avoid the font registry and access the font directly. This was confirmed by analysing the processes under Process Monitor: sure enough, something had called up and used arial.ttf.
This Wikihow article was a useful lead, getting us to delete the fonts under the Windows\WinSxS folder, and showing how to take ownership of them. I donât know if altering these ultimately affected the ones inside Windows\Fonts, but I followed the instructions, to find that the original Arial was being accessed by three programs: Vivaldi, Keybase, and Qt Qtwebengineprocess. I shut each one of these down and removed the Arial family.
Reboot: it was still there. Then it hit me, and I posted the solution in the Microsoft Answers forum (perhaps inadvertently prompting a Microsoft programmer to make things even harder in future!). Another user had told me it was impossible, but I knew that to be untrue, since it had been possible every other time.
The solution is pretty simple: since you canât see the full Windows\Fonts directory with Windows Explorer, then I needed another file manager.
Luckily, I had 7zip, which I opened as an administrator. It allowed me to go into the folder and view all its contents, not just the fonts called up under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts, which we know is not an accurate representation of the fonts being used by the system. From there I could finally delete the offending four fonts without changing the ownership (which makes me wonder if the Wikihow advice of changing the owner under Windows\WinSxS wound up affecting the Windows\Fonts files). Once again, I had to close Keybase, Vivaldi and Qt Qtwebengineprocess.
It took from c. 4 p.m., when my desktop PC updated to v. 2004 (my laptop had been on it for many weeks; soon after its release, in fact) to 2 a.m., with a break in between to cook and eat dinner. Iâm hoping those hours of having typographic OCD helps others who want to have a font menu where they determine what they should have. Also, user beware: donât delete stuff that the system really, really needs, including an icon font that Windows uses for rendering its GUI.
Using Google as a last resortâexcept this search, which I did again as an illustration, now displays in CG Triumvirate rather than Arial. Normally, Google is a big Arial user (Arial and sans-serif are in the CSS specs) and Chromium browsers are all too happy to circumvent the registry-registered fonts and go straight into your hard drive.
Tags: 2020, Agfa, Chromium, Compugraphic, fonts, Helvetica, Microsoft, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Windows, Monotype, software, typeface, typefaces, typography, Vivaldi
Posted in design, technology, typography | 9 Comments »
More Wikialityâand this time it’s about me!
13.08.2020Goes to show how seldom I ego-search.
Hereâs something a Wikipedian wrote about me in a discussion in 2010:
Jack Yan is not a notable typeface designer. He has never laid a hand on mouse or trackball to operate a font editing application. He tells some graphic designer employees of his what he wants them to draw with software, and has them do all the work of drawing and solving all the design problems involved in creating and designing a typeface and its fonts. As a professional typeface designer myself, Yan’s involvement in type design and font production does not qualify him as a typeface designer. Not even close.
The user is called James Arboghast, whom Iâve never heard of in any of my years in the type design business.
Now, you can argue whether Iâm notable or not. You might not even like my designs. But given that Arboghast has such a knowledge of our inner workings, then maybe it would suggest that I am?
Based on the above, which is libellous, let me say without fear of committing the same that, in this instance, Mr Arboghast is a fantasist and a liar.
Iâve no beef with him outside of this, but considering that I was the first typeface designer in this country to work digitallyâso much so that Joseph Churchward, who is indisputably notable, came to me 20 years ago to see if we could work togetherâthere were no âgraphic designer employeesâ around who had the skills. At least none that I knew of when I was 14 years old and deciding which bitmaps to light up on an eight-by-eight grid.
There were still no such people around when I began drawing stuff for submission to ITC, or when I began drawing stuff that I digitalized myself on a hand-held scanner. I certainly couldnât afford employees at age 21 when I asked my Mum to fork out $400 to buy me a really early version of Fontographer. And there were still no such people around when I hand-kerned 1,000 pairs into my fonts and did my own hinting. Remember, this was pre-internet, so when youâre a young guy in Wellington doing this work in isolation, you had to know the skills. I might even have those early drawings somewhere, and not that long ago I found the maths book with the bitmap grid.
If I didnât know about the field then I certainly would have been found out when the industry was planning QuickDraw GX and I was one of the professional typeface designers advising on the character sets, and if I didnât know how to solve design problems, then the kerning on the highway signsâ type in this country would not comply with NZS. (The kerning is terrible, incidentally, but government standards are government standards. It was one of those times when I had to turn in work that I knew could be far, far better.) I’d also have been seriously busted by my students when I taught the first typeface design course in New Zealand.
Every single retail release we have has been finished by me, with all the OpenType coding done by me. All the alternative characters, all the ligatures, all the oldstyle numerals and accented characters in languages I canât begin to fathom. Latin, Cyrillic and Greek. Iâve tested every single font weâve released, whether they are retail or private commissions.
The only time a team member has not been credited in the usual way was with a private commission, for a client with whom I have signed an NDA, and that person is Jasper Luki, a very talented young designer with whom I had the privilege to work at the start of his career in the 2010s.
The fact that people far, far more famous than me in the type field around the world, including in his country, come to me with contract work might suggest that, if Iâm not notable, then Iâm certainly dependable.
And people wonder why I have such a low opinion of Wikipedia, where total strangers spout opinions while masquerading as experts. The silver lining is that writing the above was a thoroughly enjoyable trip down memory lane and a career that Iâm generally proud of, save for a few hiccups along the way.
Tags: 2010, fonts, JY&A Fonts, typeface, typeface design, typeface designer, Wikipedia
Posted in design, New Zealand, technology, typography, Wellington | 1 Comment »
How Jaguar Land Rover can still win its Land Rover Defender IP case against Ineos
09.08.2020I havenât read the full judgement of the Land Rover Defender case, where Jaguar Land Rover sought to protect the shape of the original Defender under trade mark law, to prevent Ineos from proceeding with the Grenadier.
According to Bloomberg, as reported in Automotive News, âThe judge upheld the findings by the IP Office that while differences in design may appear significant to some specialists, they âmay be unimportant, or may not even register, with average consumers.ââ
On the face of it, this would appear to be a reason for upholding JLRâs claimâbut the Indian-owned Midlands car maker seems to have muddled the cause of action it was supposed to have taken.
Iâve already taken issue with its inability to protect the L538 Range Rover Evoque shape in China under that countryâs laws, and while that judgement was eventually overturned in JLRâs favour, the company could have saved itself a great deal of stress had it filed its registration in time. It had been ignorant of Chinese law and wasted time and resources pursuing Ford Motor Company affiliate Landwind for its Range Rover Evoque clone, the X7. I sense Landwind could have afforded the ultimate fine.
Here I think arguing copyright might have been a better method. The Land Rover Station Wagon shape hails from 1949, and with 75 yearsâ protection, the company is covered till 2024. You donât need to show a registration, and the onus of proof, once objective similarity is found, is on the defendant. That test of objective similarity, unlike that in trade mark, is not based on what the average consumer thinks, but on what specialists think. And the scenes Ă faire doctrine has been adopted by precedent in the UK.
Maybe that was the game plan all along: to fail here, and to proceed using copyright later. Iâm sure the plaintiff knows this. Now, armed with the judgementâs findingsâthat the differences are insignificantâ Jaguar Land Rover can pursue a copyright claim using these as evidence.
To me, the Grenadier is sufficiently similar. Some point to the Puch G as another source of inspiration but I canât see it. And since a court has ruled that they canât see it, either, then Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos had better not break out the champagne just yet.
Tags: 2020, car, car design, car industry, copyright, copyright law, Ineos, intellectual property, IP, Jaguar Land Rover, Jim Ratcliffe, Landwind, law, Tata, UK
Posted in business, cars, design, India, UK | No Comments »
Reaching the end of Facebook
05.08.2020With the new season of Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei nearly upon us, I decided Iâd pop into my Facebook group (Iâm still an admin) to see what had been happening. Iâve been there a few times this week and I have discovered some of the siteâs latest features.
Groups: these now have three posts. Thatâs it. Three. It doesnât matter how long they have been running, Facebook doesnât want you to be bothered by history or anything so stupid. Therefore, after the third post (fourth if youâve just posted something), youâve reached the end. Saves heaps on the server bills, since I guess theyâre not as rich as they would have us believe.
(This bug has been around for years but now itâs the norm, so maybe they eventually figured out it was a cost-saving feature.)
On groups: welcome to the end of Facebook. This is the last post.
Comments: donât be silly, you shouldnât be able to comment. This is a great way for Facebook to cut down on dialogue, because they can then just propagate nonsense before an election. We know where Zuckâs biases are, so they want to be a broadcaster and publisher. You can select the word âReplyâ in the reply box, you just canât type in it. (Again, an old bug, but it looks like itâs a feature. Iâm still able to like things, although on many previous occasions over the last decade or more that feature was blocked to me.)
Commenting: they let me have one reply, but replying to someone who has replied to you? Forget it, it’s impossible.
In the reply box, you can highlight ‘Reply’ but you can’t type in there. That would be too much to ask.
Notifications: these never load, had haven’t done for a long time. Remember the ad preferencesâ page? They donât load, either, so Facebook has now extended the âcircleâ to notifications. If you donât see notifications, you wonât need to continue a threadânot that you could, anyway, since they donât let you comment.
If you knew what your notifications were, you might stay longer and post stuff that makes sense. No, Facebook is for people who want to spread falsehoods among themselves. You have no place here.
Messages: why not roll out the same spinning circle here, too? They should never load, either, because, frankly, email is far more efficient and everyone should just give up on using Facebookâs messaging service.
Time to go back to email: if you were ever silly enough to rely on Facebook for messaging, then you’re out of luck.
I once thought that I encountered bugs on Facebook because I was a heavy user, but as I havenât even touched my wall since 2017, this cannot be the reason. I also used to say their databases were âshot to hellâ, which could be the case. And I still firmly believe I encounter errors because Iâm more observant than most people. Remember, as Zuckâs friend Donald Trump says, if you do more testing, youâll find more cases.
I’ve even found the “end” of Instagram, at the point where nothing will show any more.
The end of Instagram: when you can find the limit to the service.
No one’s posting much these days. In the early 2010s, there’d be no way I’d ever get to see the end of my friends’ updates.
Solution: donât use Facebook. And definitely don’t entrust them with your personal data, including your photosâeven if you trust them, they’ll potentially get lost. From what I can tell, the site’s increasing inability to cope suggests that its own technology might fail them before the US government even gets a chance to regulate! Andâthe above topics asideâit may be time to regulate Facebook and pull in the reins.
Tags: 2010s, 2020, 2020s, bug, bugs, computing, error, errors, Facebook, Instagram, privacy, technology, trust
Posted in internet, politics, technology, USA | No Comments »