Monday, March 5, 2007

MaraDNS 1.0.40 released; Chortle font update




I have released MaraDNS 1.0.40 today. This is the legacy branch of MaraDNS that will no longer be supported for anything besides serious serurity holes after December 21 of this year.

In this release of MaraDNS, I have backported the changes to the UDP code to make it more resilient. No other changes have been done to this code.

MaraDNS 1.0.40 can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/1.0/

The next thing I need to do is update the MaraDNS webpage.




I have also updated the Chortle font. In this update, I have made some experimental changes:
  • I have put a dot in the middle of the number 0 to distinguish it from O.
  • I have made the upper stroke 1 more angular to distinguish it from l.
  • I have added a BoldItalic typeface (Experimental; the spacing around "i", for example, looks wrong)
  • I have finished the bold, italic, and boldItalic forms of the 15 pixel typeface


So, let look at the new version of the Chortle font:



Here, you can clearly see the dot in the zero. I have mixed feelings about this dot. It looks fine on the screen, but doesn't look as good as the zero without a dot in the printing font. I have already experimented with making the dot smaller. I may get rid of it completely from the printing font and only have it visible on the screen.

I have also made the angle in the upper stroke of the number one more pronounced, so you can not confuse it with the l. Again, I'm not sure this is as attractive as the original "1", but the change is not as great as the change with the zero, so I will keep this change.

These changes do not affect the metrics of the font.

I have also finished up the bold 15 pixel bit map font, the italic bitmap font, and even now have a bold italic font. Since I've already shown you the bold bitmap font, let me show you the italic font:



If you look closely, you will realize that this font is, by and large, an oblique font instead of an italic font. This is because, at low screen resolutions, it is very difficult to make an attractive true italic font. So, instead, we have this mostly oblique font (the "f", "o", and "l" come from the italic font, however).

I have also made a bold italic bitmap font:



This was done rather quickly; I had FontForge generate a bold italic font from the bold font, then quickly corrected the obvious errors. I am not completely satisfied with this typeface. However, I feel it is more important to work on the Roman, Italic, and Bold fonts at other sizes before trying to make this more readable.

But, before doing all that, I need to get back to MaraDNS, update the webpage, and finish up the changes to the memory allocation.

Chortle, as always, can be downloaded here:

http://www.samiam.org/Chortle/