ABishop@massey.ac.nz (A.G. Bishop) (09/17/90)
I will try to highlight the watermarks in the development of concepts so that you can skip through if you want to. ** The Source of all this tosh ** Douglas Hofstader wrote a book called "Godel, Escher and Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid" which is very good, a mental gymnasium of a book. This is not about anything in that book (directly) - but you should read it if you ever get the opportunity. He also wrote a column for Scientific American called "Metamagical Themas" and published much of the material later in a book of that name. This is also an excellent book, what is more, that is where I got the idea of meems, knobs and font machines from. ** Meems ** A meem is a "lifeform" that relies on being interesting to propagate itself. Somebody thinks one up, if it is a good meem (s)he tells someone about it before forgetting and that person is interested enough to remember it and pass it on, etc. For an example of a meem see knobs below. ** Knobs ** Imagine a machine which displays some text on a machine, it may be an alphabet, a single letter or a sample of some well-known document. The display in front of you has several knobs placed underneath it, each knob affects one characteristic of the text. Not only simple characteristics can be associated with the setting of a knob (eg. point size) but also more abstract concepts (eg. curliness, serifness, "written with an italic nib"-ness, etc.). By now you can see what a knob is, you will also be ahead of me in seeing that it can work with things other than typefaces. A picture of a house with each knob controlling one aspect of architectural style, a story with a "happy ending" knob, a "comedy" knob ... ** Font machine ** I have described the basis of the font machine in the section above. The idea can, however, lead to some interesting questions (not necessarily to answers, but we'll ignore implementation details for now ;-). How many knobs would you need to cover a certain set of typefaces? Given X knobs with Y settings used to represent Z character sets how much bigger is X*Y than Z? Could we use the knob setting positions to label the fonts? Could we label all existing fonts by the settings of a hypothetical font machine without building it? If so, would experimenting with the unused combinations to find appealing typefaces be profitable? ** Winding down ** I think the book presented the ideas better than I have. I will point out that there are two meems here, the font machine and the meem concept itself. I remember one of the final paragraphs in this section of the book pointed out that the first letter of itself was in one font and the last in a quite distinct but that no two adjacent letters in between looked in the least different. Has anyone else read this stuff? I loved it! Apologies for any mis-spellings Mr H, if you are there. -- The opinions, policies and biases | A.G.Bishop@massey.ac.nz inflicted upon the Gentle Reader | Palmerston North, herein are owned by me. | New Zealand