Month: January 2019

FastStone Capture

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Software

Printscreen on Steroids I capture screen shots dozens of time a day to illustrate replies to support questions on forums. I frequently want to annotate the screen shot to point to particular parts of the User Interface, or highlight a problem area. FastStone Capture 9.0 is Shareware, but it is only $19.95 for a lifetime license, so there is no good reason not to register it. If you just want to try before you buy, […]

MainType Font Manager

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Software / Typography

Keeping Your Fonts Organised If you publish anything, whether in print media, as PDF files, or as HTML web pages, you need to use different fonts. Most users have hundreds or thousands installed with their software that they seldom, if ever use. Windows also comes with a lot of default fonts. If you take a little time to organise your fonts, and uninstall unused fonts, the process of selecting fonts in applications will become much […]

Arranged and Forced Marriages

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Buddhism / Current Affairs

Arranged Marriages It is part of the Buddhist tradition for parents to find a suitable wife for their sons. This is given as one of the duties of Parents to their sons in the Siṅgāla Sutta. “In five ways, householder’s son, the parents ministered to as the east by a son show him compassion. They restrain him from evil, they exhort him to do good, they train him to acquire skills, they seek a suitable […]

What Are OpenType Features?

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Typography

Not Just Small Capitals penType fonts can include Decorative Capitals, which may be implemented as Stylistic Alternates, or Contextual Alternates. In my fonts, the coloured capitals are implemented as Stylistic Alternates. This Test Page shows them in use on a web page. Note that you can select the coloured glyphs in the heading. They are text, not graphics. Although browsers support OpenType Stylistic Alternates, WebPlus X8 does not, so on my test page they are […]

The Blessings Business

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Buddhism

How Do Monks Bestow Blessings? I am currently editing the Bodhirājakumāra Sutta, a discourse by the Buddha to Prince Bodhi when the Blessed One was dwelling at Suṃsumāragiri in the Bhagga country. Prince Bodhi had just had a new palace constructed and invited the Buddha for a meal to bless the new dwelling. Since he wished to have children, he spread the floor with white cloths, believing that if holy monks stepped on them, that […]

FontCreator — A Highly Logical Choice

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Software

FontCreator 4.0 I first started editing fonts in the late 1980’s using CorelDraw 4.0, which had an export filter for TrueType fonts. This was back in the days of Windows 3.1 and ANSI character sets. Standard fonts did not include the characters with diacritics (accents) that I needed, so I had to edit my own fonts. It was a slow process, because the export filter crashed very often. In 2002 I got a copy of […]

Serif PagePlus X9 — Publishing on a Budget

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Software

A Legacy Product The last version of Serif’s flagship product for Desktop Publishing (DTP) can no longer be bought from Serif. If you go to Serif’s website, they will be keen to tell you about their new Affinity Products. Affinity Publisher, may eventually be a better choice, but currently it lacks many of the features found in PagePlus X9. Only you can decide if the trade-off is worthwhile. Files created in PagePlus cannot be imported […]