Font Goodness

While I am not all that particular about most things, poor fonts annoy me; particularly if most of the desktop is OK. The Linux (strictly speaking XFree86) font display was always either ugly or hard to get working. Ubuntu has sorted this out in the main, but emacs-gtk was ugly. Emacs wizards will not be bothered about the GTK version as they are so productive from the command line but I like having the menus there. Fortunately I found this package.

While I am on the topic of fonts, I must recommend learning LaTeX. If you have ever read a maths or science paper you will recognise the output; beautiful, well structured documents. LaTeX is an extension to TeX, which was created by Donald Knuth as he was unhappy with the quality of maths journals. Checkout AUCTeX and Flyspell (a syntax-aware spellchecker) to more easily create the source files in emacs. For a WYSIWYG tex editor, see TeXmacs. For a WYSIWYM (What you see is what you MEAN) editor, see LyX.

I was looking for a good template to use for a CV, as Jane needs one and I would like to keep mine up to date with things I am currently doing, when I found this advice. I will probably create a LaTeX style using some of the hints there as my current CV was made using some crappy windows software. The site points to quite an interesting article on using type heirachys to show the relative importance of parts of a document, graphic designer types should check out that page as it is pretty interesting.