MaraDNS snapshot

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I have released a new snapshot of MaraDNS today that fixes a problem with RFC4074 section 4.2 compliance. I have also backed off on the changes to the recursive code's memory allocation; it's time to completely rewrite the code to not use so many threads, and stop wasting time making changes to a codebase I won't be using once the recursor is rewritten.

The snapshot can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/1.3/snap/200703

I have also updated the MaraDNS roadmap page.

Chortle 0.20 released

I have released Chortle 0.20 today. This has a number of changes from the last release of Chortle:

• Dot removed from 0. It didn't look that great in printed documents.
• Bitmap renderings overhauled. Most serifs removed from bitmao renderings; lower case letters "b", "d", "g", "p", "q", "o", "y" made more round to be easier to read.
• Unicode versions of fonts removed. All fonts are now encoded with the "MaraIPA" encoding. Now I no longer have to maintain two versions of the same fonts.
• Bdf non-bold weight name changed from "book" to "medium"
• 17 pixel version of bold and italic font addded
• Vector/Outline BoldItalic version of font copied from source, in order to make this more attractive, with Chortle changes to "1", "1/4", "3/4", and middle dot done.

Here are samples of Chortle at bitmap resoltions:







Chortle is available for download here:

http://www.samiam.org/Chortle

Chortle update and sample image

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I've been doing a lot of readability (is that a word) testing with the Chortle font. I found that the fully serif font was hard on my eyes after 30 minutes or so of reading. So I starting removing some of the serifs:



This was an improvment, but it was still hard on my eyes after one or two hours of reading. So I improved it some more:



This is clear, but isn't quite readable enough to comfortably read an entire book with; I'm going to have to make a bigger version of this lettering to do that.

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MaraDNS update: I have updated the webpage.

Chortle update

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Last night, I went to so effort to see if the low-resolution bitmap version of the Chortle font would look better if there was more spacing between the letters. Here was the result:



In the image, the first paragraph is the original font. The second paragraph is a version of the font that always has two pixels between letters. The third paragraph is a version where there are between one and two pixels between letters.

After doing a lot of testing by reading a lot of text with all these fonts, I decided that the original version is the best. The version with two pixels between fonts doesn't give the letters enough space to look nice--I can't change the size of the letters because I want to preserve the metrics of the printing/outline/vector font. The version with between one and two pixels between letters has more attractive letters, but the variable spacing between letters makes it hard to read.

In the original version, the serifs and how they almost connect between letters seems to make the font easier to read.

That said, I have all three versions of the font available in a snapshot I uploaded today.

http://www.samiam.org/Chortle

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I will update the webpage for MaraDNS Friday. I will also realease Charter 0.2. At this point, the font is ready for me to start working on the software that will use the font--I will change the software to use more sizes when I make more sizes.

My MaraDNS project: Document how MaraDNS allocates and frees cache elements.

MaraDNS 1.0.40 released; Chortle font update

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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.

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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/

Another list of Free fonts

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Here is another list of free fonts.

Note that these are "free beer" fonts. These are not open source fonts.

Here are some websites for some bona fide open source fonts:

• Bitstream Vera. Note that, if you have Linux and X on your system, you also have two other fonts from Bitstream that were made free in the early 1990s (and are, to the extent of my knowledge, the first ever open source Type1/TTF fonts): Bitstream Charter and Bitstream Courier.
  
• DejaVu This is Bitstream Vera with more glyphs and more subfonts.
  
• SIL has some true open source fonts These fonts were originally meant to allow linguists to have IPA in their documents (something that, in fact, my English lessons use), but these fonts are very useful for writing things in a variety of languages.
  
• Computer Modern Unicode fonts
  
• Junicode (GPL font)
  
• Free UCS outline fonts
  
• Free UCS outline fonts (again)
  
• George Williams' fonts
  
• The MgOpen fonts for English and Greek (and, in the case of Canonica, other European languages)
  
• The Damase TTF font, a public domain TTF unicode font (Main page no longer on internet, but Debian got the font)
  

And, finally, some more lists of truly free fonts: an index of open-source fonts; SIL's index of OFL fonts; yet another open source font list

Chortle update and sample images

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Here is a sample of the bitmap version of the Chortle font:



As you can see, this font is quite readable but could be improved.

One issue is the the letters are a little closer together than they are in, say, the Verdana font. There is one pixel between each letter in this font; this makes the font a little cramped looking. Another issue is with the "m", "i", and "T" letters: They are asymmetrical. This is because Fontforge doesn't allow me to change the width of a bitmap version of a letter without changing the width in the vector form of the letter.

The thinking is this: We want the bitmap version to resemble, as much as possible, the high-reolsution version of the font. However, this is not possible at the small resolutions typical of computer screens, because the width on the screen has to "snap to" an integer count of pixels.

Indeed, here is a naïve rendering of the above bitmap font on a computer screen, where the characters are placed, as close as possible, to where the characters would be on the printed document:



While this is still readable, it's a little more difficult to read because there is more spacing between some letters, such as "qu" in "quick" and "la" in "lazy".

Another issue is with diagonal strokes. The "x" is a little hard to read because this letter has both diagonal strokes and serifs. The "s" used to also be difficult to read, but I revised it this morning to not have any diagonal strokes in it. I tried removing the diagonal strokes from "y", but decided that it's better to keep the diagonal strokes in this letter. Indeed, the "y" in the Verdana font has diagonal strokes (but doesn't have strokes in the X11 "Misc" font).

Here is the bold version of this font:



As you can see, this is incomplete. In particular, the uppercase accented letters haven't been done yet. As I mentioned yesterday, the letters with diagonal strokes ("A", "M", "W", "v", "w", "x") look a little darker than other letters. Strangely enough, the "z" doesn't have this problem. You may also notice that the lower case "y" doesn't have diagonal strokes; once we make this font bold, it's nay to impossible to keep "y" readable without removing the diagonal strokes. Like the roman font, some letters, such as "r" and "v", suffer because we can't make these letters wider.

Anyway, in addition to getting to the bottom of MaraDNS' memory management, my next project is to finish the bold font, then work on the italic font, then do all this work again at other pixel sizes.

Again, the URL for the Chortle font is here:

http://www.samiam.org/Chortle