Category Archives: Typography

The glorious art of designing, creating, and setting documents, fonts and text

Cannibalism in the Cars, Take Two

Well, I just recently was ecstatic to discover XeTeX, an extended implementation of my favorite typesetting engine, TeX, written by Dr Donald E. Knuth. This version adds features that I have long wished for in TeX, and the lack of which were in fact the chief reason I stopped using TeX on a regular basis: support for OpenType fonts, and Unicode text.

This finally afforded me the opportunity to re-work Mark Twain’s Cannibalism in the Cars (PDF of my latest version), using the “expert” font, Adobe Caslon Pro, instead of the original, basic Times font, support for which is built into all PDF readers.

I guess my next project would be to rewrite my résumé (PDF) using TeX (as I originally had it), which lately has been done in OpenOffice on Windows, to take advantage of my favorite OpenType fonts (OpenOffice on Unix systems does not currently support OpenType).

Excerpt from my setting of Cannibalism in the Cars

Cool Fonts

I haven’t really posted much about my interest in typography (other than my page for Cannibalism in the Cars). I’m not sure this really qualifies, but here’s a link to some of my favorite fonts from MyFonts.com, that I would be interested in purchasing at some point.

The very favorite fonts I do own, are both made by Robert Slimbach for Adobe: Minion, and Myriad. Minion was used as the primary face in my favorite book on typography, Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst, and Minion and Myriad are actually both used in Adobe’s published specifications for PDF and PostScript®.