A few more swashes for JY Pinnacle Italic

15.07.2011/13.16

JY Pinnacle Italic will be re-released as a Pro version shortly, and above are some of the extra characters we’ve added. I know the swash k still needs work, and it will be ﬁxed up by the time of release. Pinnacle always had a decent bunch of ligatures, but if you have the […]

Archæological evidence that QuickDraw GX existed

09.06.2011/23.59

Here’s a glyph inside JY Integrity that never got used beyond the original publicity in the mid-1990s. Before there was OpenType, there was QuickDraw GX, and I was part of the consortium trying to sort out the character set, along with Allan Haley and others. We were using this newfangled collaboration tool called the […]

Google humour: the Helvetica search that doesn’t come out in Helvetica

01.04.2011/12.11

[Cross-posted from Tumblr] Found via Chris Brogan: if you Google Helvetica, Google will deliver the results in your default typeface—in my case, Alia. (If you look at the Snap Shots thumbnails that pop up, they’re in Times.) It’s weird, because I thought a fun trick would be to deliver the results in Helvetica (which is, […]

Fax and text spam: bad marketing moves

21.02.2011/04.24

Above I’d mention the war, but Honda was founded after the surrender. I despise fax-spam, and under my reading of the Telecommunications Act, these come under nuisance calls. But regardless of the legality, it seems rather hypocritical for Honda to have sent me one for its Insight hybrid car. Think about it: a lot […]

No surprises as Firefox 4 reaches Beta 10

23.01.2011/03.05

Tried Firefox 4 Beta 10 on another computer altogether—the new machine in the ofﬁce. No font management software on this one, which rules out anything that could have been doing. I don’t need to say much more. The font problem is the same as on Betas 7, 8 and 9; and the fact that Google […]

McAfee did good: a software company that didn’t jerk me around in ’10

19.01.2011/12.03

A new computer arrived at the ofﬁce, Firefox 3·6·13 was installed on it. Boom goes the dynamite (thanks, Jen—since I watch very little television I had no idea of this reference). It wasn’t the ‘unmark purple’ bug, either (sample size so far: 1). It’s a different set-up to the rest. For starters, it has […]

What the suck?

14.01.2011/03.57

I think Telstra Clear’s Captcha for its Customer Zone is broken. I wish I took screen shots of each failed attempt now, since it’s kicked me off after ﬁve tries. But this one was intriguing. I never expected to see a quaint s, especially in a context as digital as a Captcha, in usage […]

What others write about their Firefox crashes; Chrome is the oddity with font-face

16.12.2010/10.53

It has been interesting reading the comments from other disgruntled Firefox users over the ‘unmark purple’ error (nsXULControllers::cycleCollection::UnmarkPurple(nsISupports*))—now that I can trace the majority of my crashes to this. Yesterday, Mozilla’s Crash Reports’ site crashed (rather ﬁtting), and today, the CSS wouldn’t load, which allowed me to read what others wrote on the […]

Roy Axe gives a sincere look at his career

11.12.2010/23.11

Keith Adams is well known to many motorheads out there. We probably encountered him initially at his excellent AROnline, formerly The Unofﬁcial Austin–Rover Resource. More recently, some of us have got to know Keith as a writer for Octane, where his well researched articles remind me of some of the best motoring journalists’ work. They […]

No changes to Opera’s typography in v. 11 beta

08.12.2010/12.23

Opera 11 still has the font-changing bug that was in 10·63, as I found tonight: Underlined are the characters (from a post on this blog) that are not displaying in the same typeface as the rest of the text. The quotation marks, all ligatures and any characters that follow a ligature before a space, […]