mgr's weblog

photofont.lisp

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:43:16 GMT

Yesterday I've stumbled upon Photofonts, a font format where every letter is a fully colored bitmap image. It also supports kerning and Unicode encoding. The file format specification is publicly documented: it's an xml file, the characters are Base64-encoded PNG images in a MIME-container. How nice! And certainly the most efficient way to store binary data.

Sadly there is no Gimp plug-in yet, but you can download a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Corel Painter for free, and the company has announced plug-ins for Adobe InDesign as well as QuarkXPress. Well, the graphic designers will be happy with those… They have also developed Flash-based embedded web font stuff, but for the program to convert photofonts into that format, called Photofont WebReady, they want to see some money.

Enough of that! A quick look into the CLiki — the Common Lisp Wiki informed me about XMLS, CL-MIME, s-base64, and CL-PNG. Everything I need. Thanks go to the authors and maintainers Drew Crampsie, Robert Marlow, Sven Van Caekenberghe, Harald Musum, and Vebjorn Ljosa! The interfaces are all quite usable and after looking into some free photofonts from the aforementioned homepage (mostly from my Lisp image using XMLS:PARSE) and some hacking I now have a photofont:

Please click on the image to have a look at the HUGE version! I hope you like it! Every single character of this font is a photograph of some arranged tea light candles. But this article is about the photofont format and my program to generate photofonts, and not about my particular Tea Light Canle Font. Perhaps there will be a separate article some time in the future…

Well, here comes the quick and dirty implementation in Common Lisp:

Read the whole article.

Using an Image Viewer as a Presentation Program,
Image Correction in Batch Mode (Using The GIMP)

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:03:02 GMT

As already mentioned in the German article Public Speech: History of Typesetting and Letterpress Printing I have given that speech without any slides. Instead I've made use of a simple image viewer and a LCD projector to present the eighty pictures. In this article I describe the preparations.

Color Correction of Scanned Images

Eighty pictures, and most of them I had to scan by myself from the various books that I have used. That means that the colors had to be altered a tad, at least we need to correct the input level of the colors (e.g. using The GIMP's Adjust Color Levels tool). We want well balanced images, the levels should be distributed all over the whole color range, and it'd be best if the text of the reverse side could not be seen through (remember that often book pages are quite thin).

If your picture is just composed of pen strokes (for example pencil drawings or woodcuts) it's a nice trick to propagate the lower value pixels before using the Levels tool (Filters → Distorts → Value Propagate, More Black), so that afterwards you can apply the Levels tool more harshly. This method is described quite nicely in Liam Quin's How to Clean Up Scanned Engravings and Old Photographs, (second) step 8. Strengthen Those Lines. He aptly writes: "The point of this is that when you make the image brighter the edges of the dark lines get eaten away, so you need to strengthen them first."

Automate the Color Correction

We certainly do not want to do this for some dozen images! Luckily The GIMP has a nice batch mode to automate this process. At the same time it is (in my opinion) a bit easier to write a batch script instead of a filter script that is embedded into The GIMP with a special dialog box (though that is not that hard, either).

How this is done is described in the compact tutorial GIMP Batch Mode. Thank you, anonymous writer, for having written that nice page! Remember to consult The GIMP's helpful Procedure Browser, (GIMP toolbox → Xtns → Procedure Browser) when writing your own scripts. It gives you a list of all commands and describes all their parameters in detail (although, sadly, it describes not everything you need to know…). Here is my script:

Read the whole article.

A European, please!

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 10:32:28 GMT

Just found googling:

--- Day changed Wed May 17 2006
[...]
57 < Xach> Any germans around?
58 < Xach> Europeans work too.
58 < Beef> dze germans, I spit on them
58 < Beef> euro here
58 < pjb> I'm French, living in Spain. Do I qualify?
58 < mvilleneuve> french here
58 < Xach> Could you go to Max-Gerd's house and ask him
                    to fix his blog?
58 < Beef> :P
58 < Xach> Max-Gerd Retzlaff lives somewhere in Germany.
59 < mvilleneuve> that's at least 1000 kilometers from
                    where I live, phone or email might be more efficient...
02 < ThomasIl> german here, why?
04 < Xach> ThomasIl: I am trying to reach Max-Gerd Retzlaff,
                    who is also German.
04 < Xach> If you all get together soon, please mention
                    to him that his blog is broken.
04 < ThomasIl> well
04 < ThomasIl> if its somewhere near my house I could do heh
04 < ThomasIl> but doubtful
04 < ThomasIl> :P
04 < lichtblau> Xach: you should get one of these fancy new
                    electronic mail things, then you can communicate
                    with him directly
05 < Xach> That's just crazy enough to work!
05 < lichtblau> Karlsruhe, if I'm not mistaken.  Someone summon
                    manuel_!
08 < gingras_y> Xach, why don't you leave a comment on his blog?
08   gingras_y ducks 
09 < Adrinael> Priceless.
[...]
14   Xach kicks gingras_y into YGingrasland 

Curious Dead-Sexy-Xach!

(Full text in the publicly archived logs of the freenode-channel #lisp.)

Read the whole article.

mgr's weblog

photofont.lisp

Using an Image Viewer as a Presentation Program, Image Correction in Batch Mode (Using The GIMP)

Color Correction of Scanned Images

Automate the Color Correction

A European, please!

Using an Image Viewer as a Presentation Program,
Image Correction in Batch Mode (Using The GIMP)