Guess what this mystery character is used for ?

Today I came across an interesting blog post related to a mystery character. The character in question is the one shown below.

Fig: Picture of the mystery character.

Let's see what effect this mystery character has when it is cut and pasted in different text fields....

Fig: Firefox address bar

Fig: Pasted inside Gimp

As you can see, after this character is pasted, all the succeeding text is typed backwards from right to left. Really strange.

The closest valid explanation that was made was the following comment made by Charlie Halpern in the afore mentioned blog. And I quote ...

As noted about, the backwards type comes from the other characters, not from the circle of commas. The circle of commas (҉) is the Unicode character U+0489 COMBINING CYRILLIC MILLIONS SIGN. It actually is supposed to combine with the character before it, surrounding it with them crazy commas. It is a historic character that isn’t much in current use. See this pdf document for more details.

Note: For this unique magic to work, the program into which you paste this symbol should support unicode. For example, pasting this symbol in an 8-bit Ascii software such as Windows Notepad or Internet Explorer will display a series of gibberish.

Metric equivalent of Microsoft fonts for Linux

Visit any random website and chances are the website expects your machine to have a set of fonts which have become the de-facto standard on the Internet. The fonts being Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New and so on. While it may not be illegal to install these fonts on a Linux machine, they are propritery and are owned by Microsoft. And Microsoft does not licence third parties to redistribute these fonts - a reason why you don't find these commonly used popular fonts installed in Linux by default.

This is going to change once and for all. Red Hat in association with Ascender Corp has developed a set of fonts which are the metric equivalent of the most popular Microsoft fonts, and they have released it under the GPL+exception license. Three sets of fonts have been released, them being:

1. Sans - a substitute for Arial, Albany, Helvetica, Nimbus Sans L, and Bitstream Vera Sans
2. Serif - a substitute for Times New Roman, Thorndale, Nimbus Roman, and Bitstream Vera Serif and
3. Mono - a substitute for Courier New, Cumberland, Courier, Nimbus Mono L, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.
   

The advantage for Linux users is that now you don't have to explicitly install Microsoft fonts anymore as the web sites or documents which use Microsoft fonts will display flawlessly using the metric equivalent fonts which can be included in all Linux distributions by default.

The work on the fonts is yet to be completed and so will be released in two stages. In the first stage, all the fonts are released as fully usable but will lack the full hinting capability provided by True Type/Free Type technology. In the second phase of the release which will happen some time in later half of 2007, the fonts will have full hinting capability and will be at par with or excel the Microsoft fonts in quality. For now Red Hat has made available all the fonts for download so that you can test it on your machine.

Creating good quality fonts - ie. fonts which retain its quality even in smaller sizes is a very tedious and time consuming process. And buying good quality fonts is a very costly affair with each set of fonts costing anything upwards of $100 . By taking the initiative to develop good quality fonts which are the metric equivalent of Microsoft fonts, and releasing them under a Free licence, Red Hat has done a very good deed for the Free Software and Open Source cause.

15 tips to choose a good text type

When you use good fonts in articles either in print or in screen, it always makes a positive impression on the reader. Good fonts motivate a person to read the article from start to finish. Many times I have come across books - especially scientific journals which have a very small type face - so small that you end up squinting your eyes to read the text. In those circumstances, even if the article in question holds my interest, I usually pass it by or at the most just skim through the headings. Now a days most books that are printed have a good type face and the publishers have realized the advantages of using scientifically designed fonts to enhance the reading experience.

But selecting a good text type is not just imperative for printing, it holds equal importance in publishing articles for the web. Till a few years back, the font rendering in Linux was below par and the result was that viewing web pages was atmost lackluster. But now a days, rendering fonts in Linux has been significantly improved with support for anti-aliasing and sub pixel hinting that it has turned into a very good experience.

In a previous post titled "Optimal use of fonts in GNU/Linux", I had mentioned about all the facets related to fonts and how one can optimally use fonts in Linux. Now Juan Pablo De Gregorio blogs about the characteristics of good fonts and what fonts are good in a particular situation which makes an interesting read.

Optimal use of fonts in GNU/Linux

Ask any person who has used a computer atleast once and he will agree that fonts form a very important part of the operating system which is installed in the computer. At one time, GNU/Linux lacked good font support and any webpage viewed in a web browser was at the most lackluster.

Things changed somewhat with the release of good set of fonts for GNU/Linux called Bitstream. But even now the Linux counterparts (Mac OSX and Windows) enjoy a slight edge as far as good fonts are concerned. One look on the web will throw up lots of fonts and each of them can be installed in Linux but they lack in one aspect or the other and it costs a bundle to buy a good set of fonts. So the big question is - how do you enhance your Linux experience ? And is it possible to do so with the default set of fonts that are bundled with Linux?

Avi Alkalay, Donovan Rebbechi and Hal Burgiss together has written an enlightening article which explains all the facets related to fonts and how one can optimally use fonts in Linux which makes an informative read. I found the article exhaustive in its handling of this subject and contain such unique information as different types of fonts, steps for migrating a set of fonts from one system to another, the font technologies such as true type, bitmap fonts and so on, different places from where one can source good fonts for use in Linux and finally a collection of font software for Linux. The article is replete with screenshots and is a must read for any Linux enthusiast who is interested in further enhancing the user experience in Linux.

The case of some Flash based games unable to display text when viewed in GNU/Linux

One persistent problem I used to face while using GNU/Linux was when I visited sites containing certain flash based games. The games played well but they never displayed the text embedded in it. I thought that it was a drawback of the flash player ver 7 provided for Linux. It never occurred to me to dig into the problem and find why it was happening so.

But recently, in the process of installing a software package, I installed all the core Microsoft fonts on my machine running Linux. In Ubuntu/Debian, there is a package called msttcorefonts which bundles all the most common true type Windows fonts. You can also copy the fonts from your Windows partition to Linux if you are dual booting between the two OSes. Once the fonts were installed, I was pleasantly surprised to see the above mentioned problem disappear.

That was when it struck me that perhaps the flash game in question could be using a Windows specific font to render the text in the game. And since there are no Windows fonts on a default Linux installation, the flash game/site is unable to show the text.

Fig: The game viewed on a system devoid of Windows fonts

Fig: ...and after the Windows fonts were installed.

So the next time you visit a flash site and can't see any text, be sure that it is because you don't have Windows fonts on your machine running Linux.

Adding Windows Fonts in Linux

Unlike past times, Linux do come with good fonts. And the font rendering can be made better by choosing to antialiase the fonts. But at times you come across a website which has been designed with the windows user in mind. Such websites are best viewed with one of the windows fonts. If you have windows OS installed on your machine, you can copy the essential fonts from the windows partition to linux and use them to get a better web experience. Here is how you do it.

Method I :
Copy the ttf (True Type Fonts) fonts Ariel, Tahoma, Verdana, Courier New and Times New Roman from the windows partition to the fonts:// location in nautilus.

Method 2 :

Some people who are using Ubuntu have said that they can't do it as normal user. And since Ubuntu does not have a root account, they find difficulty in using su to copy eaither. Such people can do the following:

Create a '.fonts' folder in your home directory and copy the necessary fonts into it. Now you have access to the fonts on a per user basis.

Method 3:

This method can be used to install the fonts system wide if the above two methods do not give satisfactory results.

First find out in which location linux has installed the truetype fonts. It is usually at the location '/usr/share/fonts/truetype/' . But you may also do a search for the same as follows:

# find /usr -iname \*.ttf |head -n 5

Once you know the path of the fonts directory, move to this directory and create a folder there (it can be any name).

# cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype
# mkdir windowsfonts

Note: You need to be logged in as root while doing this.

Next copy all the windows ttf fonts to the windowsfonts directory that was just created.

# cp /media/hda1/windows/Fonts/*.ttf .

Now change the ownership of the fonts as well as make sure they have a right of 644 .

# chown root.root *.ttf
# chmod 644 *.ttf

Now run the command mkfontdir while in the windowsfonts directory.

# mkfontdir

This will create an index of the fonts in the directory. It will also create two files fonts.dir and fonts.cache-1 .

Now moving to the parent directory, edit the file fonts.cache-1 using your favourate editor and append the following line to it.

#File: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/fonts.cache-1
...
"windowsfonts" 0 ".dir"

Lastly run the command fc-cache.

# fc-cache

This command will scan the font directories on the system and build font information cache files for applications using fontconfig for their font handling.

That's it. Now you can have access to windows fonts in all your X applications including firefox and OpenOffice.org.