Yeah. Doing it all manually would take ages and be quite error prone. I did generate all the lookup rules with a script, just didn't think it important enough to mention in the blog post.
Definitely! For example, Glyphs has a decent python scripting API which could be used to automate the whole process. I used it for automatically assigning each layer the correct color attribute to save me some clicks. And I also generated all the calt lookup rules from a list of keywords.
Thank you! (I'm the author)
I'm also very curious to know if there's some nifty way of improving the lookup logic. What I did was kind of a brute force method, but on the other hand, the CALT "language" is very limited.
For font editors, Glyphs is the industry standard, and, as far as I know, there are not many good alternatives. There's FontForge, but its contextual alternate editing seems even more confusing: https://fontforge.org/docs/ui/dialogs/contextchain.html
Just today I found out about a new browser based font editor, fontra, but it looks like editing OpenType features is still on its roadmap. Maybe something to keep an eye on though. https://fontra.xyz/
I wonder, if looking at the actual diffs of the before/after font it wouldn't be possible to write a compiler of sorts, taking a grammar, a font and a color scheme - outputting a custom font with highlighting for the grammar?
Perhaps especially if the sibling comment about embedding a state machine pans out?
I have been considering using php like that. It would solve most of my issues. The problem is that I would still like to use static hosts, like netlify or GitHub pages, and they don't support php...In addition I would have to run php on my local machine, where as I would prefer to just edit html with no setup necessary. But if anyone knows a good free host with php support, let me know!
Your solution is quite nice and probably as simple as site generators get, but I was thinking of using php just for some simple includes etc. Here's my inspiration post which explains what I'm after, and why generators in general are not the solution (for me): http://ankarstrom.se/~john/articles/html2/
If you are willing to use netlify and are willing to use PHP, what is the inhibition to use a static site generator like Hugo? It is supported by netlify and others. I believe GitHub pages also supports a bunch of static site generators.
I am using 11ty for the blog, and it works great, for now. But there's two reasons I don't like it:
1. I need to have two different versions of my site, dev and prod, which I find very restricting and fragile.
2. I don't like to rely on other people updating their npm packages just so I could publish static content. I've been burned too many times by abandoned npm packages or breaking changes.
ASCII just refers to the 7bit standard, so if we are pedantic ASCII art is just art using the printable characters of the 128 code points defined in it. Font size doesn't have anything to do with it. But ASCII art is used as an umbrella term, encompassing a variety of different standards, character sets and fonts. There are a bunch of square ASCII, like PETSCII, ATASCII and even PC ASCII can be rendered with a 8x8 cp437 font. We don't need to gatekeep what "qualifies" as ASCII art.
While DEL didn't stamp a black square on typewriters, it sometimes did so (or something similar, like diagonal stripes) in various digital character sets. ISO 2047[0] established the graphical representations for the control characters of the 7-bit coded character set in 1975, maily for debugging reasons. This graphical representation for DEL was used by Apple IIGS, TRS-80 and even Amiga!
For me HSL is not intuitive at all. I always struggle to remember what hue of each colour is. I would even say that rgb is still the most intuitive for picking a particular color hue, but of course HSL or the newer ones like oklch are much better at picking matching saturation and lightness levels.
RGB is intuitive for math adepts or for folks that can visualize the full RGB cube along 3-axis in their minds.
The rest of us need to work with average-brain color systems such as HSL (or the even better but sadly not well supported HSB) with an acronym for colors at every 60° in the wheel.
Saturation: From 0%-Dullard Gray to 100%-Eye Popping Full Color of Hue
Lightness: From 0%-Black to 100%-White.
Usually one fixes the Hue and then adjusts saturation/lightness to get the tints one needs.
You can split hue even further at 30° intervals to get the some more standard named colors.
30°-Orange between 0°-Red and 60°-Yellow
90°-Chartreuse between 60°-Yellow and 120°-Green
150°-Spring Green between 120°-Green and 180°-Cyan
210°-Azure between 180°-Cyan and 240°-Blue
270°-Violet between 240°-Blue and 300°-Magenta
330°-Rose between 300°-Magenta and 360°-Red
You don’t need to know anything more about math to understand additive colour mixing.
Colour computer screens use RGB - colour printers use CMYK. (K is ‘black’, which is not a primary or secondary colour, so we’ll ignore it for now.)
They nest into eachother, with RGB being primary colours and CMY being secondary: R-y-G-c-B-m-R. Any kid that’s used fingerprints or water colours knows how to combine primary colours to get secondary colours.
You know if you want red, then you do 100% red. You know if you want yellow, you do 50% red, 50% green. If you want orange, which is a more reddish yellow, you do 75% red, 25% green. Brown might be a little more complicated - but still, what is brown? Darker orange? Maybe 25% red, 15% green? Try it and see!
(Also for black and white - again, any kid with a prism and a flashlight (or sunbeam) knows that white light is all colours together - red 100%, green 100%, blue 100%. The opposite of white is black, which is no light at all, which is just 0% across the board.)
No math adeptety or cube visualization necessary, this is all elementary school children level stuff. You already know most of it.
Did you observe that in ALL your examples you have given only 2 colors at a time ? This is because it is extremely difficult to visualize 3 colors additively together. Doing it with trial and error and "try it and see" is painful. Too much wasted time. (Well..there ARE some people who are expert at mixing 3 colors - they visualize the full RGB cube and magically output 3-color permutations off the bat after looking into space...)
Whereas, Hue in a 360° axis gives you a braindead-simple, direct color access - cycling across the color wheel with well-defined, named and representative colors at regular degree intervals. The 2D visualization of a circle is far easier.
You grab your primary color - hue and then you adjust your saturation and lightness (which is across a simple, linear semantic axis) to get tones and shades. FAR more simpler than RGB to get an elegant color palette going. You can knock out a distinct color palette for a site using HSL in ~5-10mins. Use a color-contrast tool against text to check accessibility and then you never pay attention to color again.
I agree. HSV is the opposite of intuitive to me. But "intuitive" is subjective, and HSV encoding does, as you point out, make certain types of operations much easier than RGB encoding does (and vice versa).
In the end, I think it's just a case of use the type of encoding that is appropriate for what, specifically, you're doing.
This is probably coming to CSS in the coming years. [0] Which makes me very excited for one reason: CSS is nearing feature parity (and surpassing it in some areas) with Adobe InDesign, so we can finally ditch adobe and just make print publications within the browser. The only other thing missing after custom colour profiles is a proper text justification algorithm, although, for many, it's not so important because people are already used to reading ragged text.
There's one surprising way I still find a lot of great material on Google, which works especially for niche research topics, is to view Image results. I click on any interesting image in the results and then I check the site it's from. Many times I've found super interesting stuff that would not appear in the first pages of text results.
The author of the font made it also Glyph Drawing Club "compatible", which is a modular shape builder I've built that works with font files. You can just drag and drop an otf or ttf file on the app window and it'll load the glyphs as svg shapes to draw with. The neat thing is that it works in two dimensions, and you can also rotate (with r hotkey) or invert (with i hotkey) the glyphs, and output the drawing as SVG or PNG.
This is pretty neat, and cool as a design style for doing "tilesque" types of drawing. Would there happen to be a way to add your own tileset, font, or tile atlas? Would then allow for rather quick tilemap creation (GB, NES, SNES style; a lot of cell phone games, many Steam releases, ect...). Lots of market. 500 games released last week on Steam. https://steamdb.info/upcoming/?lastweek Out of the 28 so far today, 6 appear to be tile based.
If not, may borrow at least some of the design features for a project, as with a bit of simplification in a few areas, and changes for cell phones, it would actually make a nice way for users to interact with tile based games. Place an object, move an object, flip an object.
The tab based design and layout also works nicely desktop to phone for the most part, which is a nice plus for adaptation.
Anyways, neat tool, and especially design flow and layout. Also, the 15 pages of font use on https://velvetyne.fr/in-use/ is pretty crazy to look at.
EDIT: Also, to the author of Teranoptia, the licensing layout is actually rather nice and really clear about uses immediately. Lot of the web has vague license names, yet the direct use listing is beneficial.
