Style change – \usepackage{newtxmath}

This post is a quick annouce­ment that I changed the main text and math fonts and hope­ful­ly for the better.

Back­ground: This blog runs on Word­Press, using an almost vanil­la Twen­tyEleven theme and using the Quick­La­TeX plu­g­in for math type­set­ting. But while Word­Press uses a default sans-serif font (it explic­it­ly prefers Hel­veti­ca but also accepts any looka­like) the default font in \LaTeX is usu­al­ly Com­put­er Mod­ern, a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ence type­face. So with stan­dard set­tings, there was always going to be a font mis­match between text and math.

In order to mit­i­gate this, I pre­vi­ous­ly found Com­put­er Mod­ern Bright as an alter­na­tive \LaTeX font (see the old announce­ment post) that is a bet­ter match with Hel­veti­ca. CM Bright is one of the few sans-serif fonts in \LaTeX that has full math sup­port. But CM Bright also has issues, for exam­ple it is hard dis­tin­guish low­er­case l from upper­case I, and some of the gen­er­at­ed SVGs do not ren­der cor­rect­ly, espe­cial­ly if they are images of sin­gle letters.

Now I switched the main body text to Times, or what­ev­er the browser’s default serif font is. This is then com­bined with the newtx-pack­age on the \LaTeX-side, so now text and math use the same font (at least the­o­ret­i­cal­ly). See how this turns out for yourself:

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

    \[\text{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9}\]

The top row is text-mode (your browser’s ver­sion of Times or a sub­sti­tute), the bot­tom row is math-mode (a ren­dered SVG image by \LaTeX). In both cas­es, the request­ed font size is explic­it­ly 16 pix­els. It is expect­ed that the match is not per­fect, espe­cial­ly that the met­rics will be slight­ly dif­fer­ent, but over­all it should be an improve­ment. I am aware that com­mon wis­dom usu­al­ly says that serif fonts are bad for online view­ing, but has­n’t this advice become obso­lete with high-DPI dis­plays? And boy does the Times font look sharp and seri­ous! Every blog post now auto­mat­i­cal­ly looks like a paper.

Sorting through comment spam is burdensome

In order to keep this site spam free I approve every com­ment by hand. This means that com­ments will not imme­di­ate­ly appear after posting.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, com­ments tend to appear in bursts. There can be long stretch­es of no activ­i­ty (where I get noth­ing but spam), dur­ing which I will get lazy and will tend to check less and less often, only to be sur­prised when there are mul­ti­ple legit com­ments wait­ing (usu­al­ly after a link has been post­ed to social media).

So if you think your post got stuck just try again.

Update of my 2013 FMX Slides on Physically Based Shading in PDF format

The slides of my 2013 talk at FMX in Stuttgart were avail­able for down­load for a long time now in both Keynote and Pow­er­point for­mats. How­ev­er, peo­ple keep ask­ing for a PDF ver­sion. As I wrote in the com­ments once, I always had bad luck with the PDF export from Keynote, so I left it at that.

Yes­ter­day I made a major dis­cov­ery: The option “export to PDF” is not the only pos­si­bil­i­ty, in fact, it is quite an infe­ri­or one. The thing that I over­looked is that one can also just pre­tend to “print”, and then, in the sub­se­quent print­er dia­log, chose “save to PDF” instead. Not only does this give addi­tion­al options but also pro­duces nicer for­mat­ting and a small­er file!

I won­der how­ev­er the UI design­ers at Apple real­ly intend­ed this to be the pri­ma­ry means of PDF export? 

Any­way, I updat­ed the slides to PDF for­mat and also made some minor cor­rec­tions. I exchanged the font Human­ist 521 with Gill Sans. Appar­ent­ly the for­mer is an offi­cial clone of the lat­ter, and since Gill Sans is pre­in­stalled on a Mac any­way, I may as well just use the orig­i­nal. The met­rics also seem to look nicer in the PDF. I also copy-edit­ed some of the notes to be more edu­ca­tion­al than just a tran­script of my talk.

Here is again, the direct down­load link.

Down­load “FMX 2013 Slides PDF with Notes” fmx-11-revised.pdf – 11811-mal herun­terge­laden – 15,25 MB

Outbound link manager plugin is incompatible with QuickLatex

I found the rea­son for why some­times all Latex in my posts got clob­bered. The cul­prit was an out­dat­ed plu­g­in, which—as a side effect—deleted back­slash­es from posts. So I dein­stalled the sin­ner and also repaired all math that I found was bro­ken. If you still find bro­ken math, drop me a line.

Most Popular Posts and Tags

I have added a per­ma­nent page with a sum­ma­ry of the most pop­u­lar posts on this blog. I also tried to add mean­ing­ful tags to all posts. Here are the most impor­tant tags:

Content type tags

  • down­load — a down­load is avail­able is this post
  • gem — a code snip­pet or oth­er copy-paste thing is available
  • math — posts that are heavy on math formulae

Topic tags

X‑Plane announces Physically Based Rendering

I always won­dered when X‑Plane would jump on the PBR band­wag­on. I like X‑Plane, I think its the best active­ly-devel­oped* flight sim­u­la­tor out there, but I always felt that shad­ing could be bet­ter. For instance, there is this unre­al­is­tic ‘Lam­bert-shad­ed’ world ter­rain tex­ture, which becomes too dark at sun­set; anoth­er is the dread­ed ‘con­stant ambi­ent col­or’ that plagues the shad­ing of objects.

Now in this post on the X‑Plane devel­op­er blog, Ben announces that Phys­i­cal­ly Based Ren­der­ing is a future devel­op­ment goal, yay! Then he goes on to say that, while sur­face shad­ing will be a solved prob­lem™ because of PBR, oth­ers like par­tic­i­pat­ing media (clouds, atmos­phere) would still need mag­ic tricks for the fore­see­able future. Weit­er­lesen

Ego mecum conjungi …

… Twit­ter!

Twitter_logo_blue

So out of a whim I just embar­rassed myself and tried to write in (prob­a­bly wrong) latin that I joined twit­ter. You can fol­low me under: @aries_code.

If you won­der how this came about, this was my train of thought:

  • Twit­ter has some­thing to do with birds
  • Birds have fan­cy latin species names
  • The species name for Spar­row is Spass­er domesticus
  • This does­n’t sound too fancy …
  • How do you say ‘I joined twit­ter’ in latin anyway?

But then I dis­cov­ered that I am onto some­thing: Accord­ing to one argu­ment, the brand name of Twit­ter should have been ‘Titi­a­tio’, had it exist­ed in antiq­ui­ty. And accord­ing to anoth­er argu­ment, latin should be an ide­al twit­ter lan­guage, because it is both short and expressive.

But I digress. If you are into com­put­er graph­ics, then you know of Johann Hein­rich Lam­bert, the eponym of our beloved Lam­bert­ian ref­electance law. The book where he estab­lished this law, Pho­tome­tria, is writ­ten entire­ly in latin—now this is hardcore!

So, now you know what to do if you want to stand out in your next SIGGRAPH paper …

Spellforce 2 Demons of the Past

Spell­force 2 was released in 2006 and will be 8 years old by april. Nev­er­the­less, the third add-on of the series shipped a month ago. Talk about a long seller!

Of course I’m attached to SF2 because I wrote many parts of its engine back then. This time I was briefly involved to help the devel­op­ers include my attribute-less nor­mal map algo­rithm. The orig­i­nal SF2 did not have any nor­mal maps, and there­fore none of the orig­i­nal art assets comes with tan­gent space infor­ma­tion. This is an ide­al sce­nario to pimp up the visu­als with­out touch­ing the geom­e­try, sim­ply by mak­ing a shad­er change and adding nor­mal maps. Weit­er­lesen

Velvet Assassin on Mac (Patch)

I just got news that Vel­vet Assas­sin has been port­ed over to the Mac and is avail­able on the App Store! How­ev­er, I was not at all involved in the Mac port and I don’t know the devel­op­ers who did – it came as a sur­prise to me as to any­one else in the for­mer team. Here is a direct iTunes link: (Edit, no longer avail­able as of 2021, unfortunately).

Shader Bug on ATI graphic cards

Unfor­tu­nate­ly there is a shad­er bug with ATI graph­ics chips.  It hap­pened to me while try­ing it out on a 2011 iMac with an ATI Radeon HD 5670. I got reports from friends that this is not a prob­lem of the Mac port itself but it hap­pens on PC too. The prob­lem is relat­ed to ATI chips with dri­vers that are new­er than 2010 or so. Here is a screenshot:

Screen shot 2013-01-11 at 04.09.06

Weit­er­lesen