Dot grid paper
I’ve added dot grid paper to the note paper page, in a handful of sizes:
Colophon: I made these with JavaScript/Node, generating SVGs that I then converted into PDFs with Inkscape.
Blog: #svg
New abstract hymn print: Be Still, My Soul.
I’m experimenting with a slightly new style here, masking the notes (after adding noise to the outlines with SVG filters and then eroding/dilating with Imagemagick) and painting inside the mask in Procreate. (And then texturing it in Affinity Photo as usual.)
A short followup to what I wrote last year about Press, my abandoned typesetting engine project: I’m now fully convinced that the web platform is where I want to do typesetting. It’s open, programmatic, and capable. Source files are plain text, easy to version control, and fairly future-proof. And even though it’s not WYSIWYG — at least not the way I’m using it — it’s much more comfortable for me as a working environment.
For non-book work (charts, some kinds of documents), I’ve found that browsers already support everything I need (like @page). That’s how I’ve done all my recent genealogy design work, and it’s how I’ll do any language charts I make going forward. And for things like books where browser support isn’t quite there yet, Paged.js works well (and will presumably be phased out once browser support gets better).
Not to mention how nice it is for both print and digital workflows (EPUB, web) to all use the same technologies. I also love that the web is cross-platform. Something I ran into when I was making charts with PlotDevice (which is Mac-only) was that people on Windows couldn’t modify the charts even when I gave them the source. That’s not a problem with the web.
I’ve even started using the web platform for less webby things like making wallpaper for my phone:
Here’s the HTML (the 375×812px size is the CSS resolution of my iPhone 12 Mini — RIP — and also keep in mind that this was for a one-off never to see the light of day, so I took the liberty of cutting a few corners):
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div class="background">
<svg id="darknoise" viewBox="0 0 375 812" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<filter id="noiseFilter">
<feTurbulence baseFrequency="0.5" numOctaves="8" />
</filter>
<rect width="100%" height="100%" filter="url(#noiseFilter)" />
</svg>
<svg id="lightnoise" viewBox="0 0 375 812" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<filter id="noiseFilter2">
<feTurbulence seed="485" baseFrequency="0.005" numOctaves="12" />
</filter>
<rect width="100%" height="100%" filter="url(#noiseFilter2)" />
</svg>
</div>
<div class="quote">Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.</div>
<div class="reference">Matthew 11:28</div>
</body>
</html>
The CSS (with the font purchased from FontShop):
* {
box-sizing: border-box;
font-family: Clifford Pro;
}
html {
height: 100%;
}
body {
color: #777;
font-size: 1.6rem;
margin: 0;
text-align: center;
}
.background {
background: radial-gradient(circle at 50% 90%, #222, #111);
bottom: 0;
left: 0;
position: absolute;
right: 0;
top: 0;
z-index: -1;
}
.background svg#darknoise {
bottom: 0;
filter: saturate(0);
left: 0;
mix-blend-mode: multiply;
opacity: 0.9;
position: absolute;
right: 0;
top: 0;
}
.background svg#lightnoise {
bottom: 0;
filter: saturate(0);
left: 0;
mix-blend-mode: soft-light;
opacity: 0.4;
position: absolute;
right: 0;
top: 0;
}
.quote {
line-height: 1.4;
margin: 25rem 1.5rem 0;
}
.reference {
color: hsl(0 40% 32%);
font-size: 1.3rem;
font-style: italic;
margin-top: 1rem;
}
I then used headless Chrome to export the PNG (Firefox would probably have worked as well, though I haven’t yet tested it for this):
/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --headless --disable-gpu --screenshot --window-size=375x812 index.html
It’s not the world’s most amazing wallpaper or anything, but I’m still pleased that I was able to make something I’m reasonably happy with using technologies I love. (I could have also used WebGL shaders or Canvas. Lots of options!)
Here’s to the open web.
Projects — Prints 2.1
Religious art
Other art
Lately I’ve been playing around with making meaningless decorative pieces in Blender, using displacement maps with (for the most part) procedural heightfields. For these I’ve generally textured the heightfield in Affinity Photo and sometimes also textured a separate color map. Looking forward to doing more work in this vein.
Just added diagonal graph paper to the note paper page. It looks like this:
Why would you use this? No idea. I haven’t been able to come up with any good use cases for it, but the itch needed to be scratched so here we are.
Sidenote: I made the original lined/grid paper with PlotDevice but decided to use SVG instead this time, converting the files to PDF with Inkscape.
Update on Press (the PDF compiler). I haven’t worked on it at all lately, but I wanted to document its current state for history’s sake, and as part of working in public. (I’ve also been sitting on this post for over a year.)
Back in 2017 I did end up re-architecting Press to use Low Ink as an intermediate page description language. In the process, Low Ink changed from a JSON-based idea to this:
:page 11x8.5in
:bleedbox x=0.125in y=0.125in w=5.75in h=8.75in
:fontmap family=helv weight=regular style=normal standard=Helvetica
:yinvert
:push
:translate x=72 y=72
# ascender
:push
:translate x=0 y=1040
:strokecolor hex=#999
:linewidth 0.25pt
:line x1=0 y1=0 x2=1080 y2=0
:stroke
:push
:fillcolor hex=#999
:font family=helv size=14pt
:text x=1085 y=-3 text="ascender"
:pop
:pop
# filled glyph
:push
:translate x=1320 y=240
:fillcolor hex=#000
:moveto x=0 y=0
:pathto x=400 y=300 cx1=120 cy1=300 cx2=140 cy2=300
:pathto x=320 y=200 cx1=540 cy1=300 cx2=320 cy2=180
:lineto x=350 y=350
:lineto x=450 y=250
:lineto x=150 y=0
:moveto x=200 y=200
:lineto x=200 y=250
:lineto x=250 y=250
:lineto x=250 y=200
:lineto x=200 y=200
:fill
:pop
It was intended to be a fairly low-level wrapper on the PDF format, with the idea being that other libraries/apps would provide more ergonomic abstractions on top of it.
I initially used Python because Press started out as a library, but with the pivot to a compiler model, I think Go or Rust would probably end up being a better choice (Rust would make integrating HarfBuzz a bit easier, at any rate).
Potential improvements
To my 2021 eyes, the language design isn’t particularly elegant. I like that the parameters are named (clarity), but for most of the commands there aren’t actually that many parameters, because many of the settings that would normally be parameters are separate commands. For parameters that are clearly unambiguous, the names hamper readability. For example, I think something like this might be better:
:line 0,0 to 1080,0
:fillcolor #345
I’ve also thought that push and pop could potentially be clearer as curly braces, and that the initial colons aren’t really necessary:
{
translate 0,1040
strokecolor #999
linewidth 0.25pt
line 0,0 to 1080,0
stroke
{
fillcolor #999
font 14pt helv
text 1085,-3 "ascender"
}
}
The future
My initial reason for building Press was to have an easy, programmable cross-platform way to create language chart PDFs (so I could move away from PlotDevice/DrawBot), and what I’ve realized (acknowledging that I haven’t really been making language charts in recent years) is that there are some other, better options now.
One that seems decent is SVG, converted to PDF by way of Inkscape. Initial tests here seem like it would probably work fine.
Another promising option that I admittedly haven’t looked into very much yet is Paged.js. HTML and CSS are already great for declarative typesetting, and the more I’ve thought about programmatic typesetting, the more this model seems to be the future I’d want to work with (and not just because of parity with web, though that makes it much more compelling).
tl;dr I don’t see myself continuing on with Press, so we may as well call a mortem on it.
Lately I’ve been playing around with implementing genealogy sparklines on the web. Still very much a work in progress, but I’m trying to do more working in public, so here’s the messy current status (and at some point I’ll post the actual HTML/CSS):
Ruby test
Implementation notes:
- The sparklines use inline SVG
- This test uses the
<ruby>and<rt>tags, withruby-positionset tounderandruby-alignset tostart(though only Firefox supports it so it’s not sadly viable for actual use yet) - I don’t really like that it makes the leading uneven (lines that have ruby vs. lines that don’t)
Design notes:
- Rather than having solid squares at the births and deaths, I’ve gone for vertical lines so they’re less obtrusive (and have also considered just getting rid of the vertical lines, though I haven’t tried it out yet)
- Circles are simple so I went with them for marriages and children
Absolute positioning test
Implementation notes:
- The names are wrapped in
spantags withposition: relativeset, and the SVG getsposition: absolute. Fairly simple. - Even leading!
- There’s some wonkiness right now when the
spanis at the beginning of a line (the sparkline shows up at the end of the previous line), haven’t tried very hard to fix it yet
New artwork: The Gathering of Israel. For a few months I’d been thinking about how to symbolically represent this idea and eventually settled on a vector field (with artistic license rashly taken) as the best fit, at least for this version. The textures all generated in SVG via a small Python script.
Links #41
Rob Weychert’s Plus Equals, a new zine about algorithmic art. The first issue was good, looking forward to future installments.
Riccardo Scalco’s Textures.js, SVG patterns for d3.js. Yum. I don’t even use d3 (at least not right now), but I’m tempted to do something with it just so I can use these.
Jason Kottke on the invention of a new pasta shape. Max sauceability as a concept will stick with me for a long time, I think.
Rytis Bieliunas on some of the darker corners of Go (the programming language). I’m writing a lot of Go at work now and this was helpful.
Austin Kleon on blogging as a forgiving medium. The idea of continually editing and refining posts after publishing them intrigues me. I fix typos if I find them, but that’s about it at the moment.
A short update on Cirque:
I took out the turbulence filters, because they shouldn’t have been there in the first place (at least not the way I had them). Instead, I’m planning to build a tool that makes it easy to apply filters to SVG elements. It’ll be more generally useful, since the SVG input won’t have to have come from Cirque.
Manually placing circles is partway done. (Placing them works; editing and deleting them is next on the list.)
I’m also refactoring to clean things up and to make the imperative code more functional where I can.