Ben Crowder

I tried to typeset some Hebrew in InDesign today. Doesn’t work. Apparently InDesign doesn’t support right-to-left text flow — not unless you have the Middle East edition. ~sigh~ Hopefully Creative Suite 3 will integrate that. So much for my bilingual psalter…

In other news, I’ve been working on some art for New Symbols, a Mormon book project which will be published next spring. Here’s a sneak preview at some drafts:

Last night I started reading Donald Knuth’s Digital Typography. Fascinating book (I’m only 100 pages into it, but it’s got me hooked). I used to use TeX. In fact, the summer before my mission I used Omega (a Unicode-enabled TeX system) to typeset Henry Sweet’s An Icelandic Primer. It turned out decently well — especially considering that I’m not even embarrassed about it. :) (Often when I go back to my old work, it makes me blush. I’ve come a long way.)

The reason I don’t use TeX anymore, however (other than that I have InDesign), is that I don’t particularly like the font choices. Computer Modern is indelibly associated with math in my mind, and even if it weren’t, I still don’t like it that much. I’ve yet to see a decent TeX font. Give me a good Garamond! With decent fonts, I’d consider using TeX again — not for my normal projects (InDesign is treating me just fine), but for other stuff. Maybe one of these days I’ll design my own Garamond-esque font in METAFONT…

[tags]InDesign, Donald Knuth, Omega, Unicode, TeX[/tags]