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Style change – \usepackage{newtxmath}

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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

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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

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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 – 11481-mal herun­terge­laden – 15,25 MB

Outbound link manager plugin is incompatible with QuickLatex

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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

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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

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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 …

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… Twit­ter!

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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

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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)

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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 →