Month: March 2009

System Fonts?

Way back in the day, when someone said “system font” what came to mind was a mono spaced font used to display information of and relating to the system, hence “system” font.

The reason was obvious to us old-heads, before there were screen fonts for editing, there were punched cards. Each punched card had 80 columns, as did the screen — everyone was happy. Continuation to another card? Put an “X” in column 72. I can’t imagine what these kids today would do if they had to sit down at a keypunch and type in all their code. Wrong key? Whoops! Gotta get a new card … Hunting down bugs? Nowadays syntax highlighting makes errors hop off the screen …

Anyway, my torturous past has nothing to do with the real reason for this post, it has to do with “System Fonts” …

Do you think the system font has anything to do these days with the site design of the operating system manufacturer? I think it probably does. Now, a system font seems to be a font that came with the system. So, Verdana was a Microsoft system font, and Lucida Grande is a Mac system font. I say Verdana was because it seems to be readily available on all systems now, but initially it wasn’t and you will not find Lucida Grande on a MS Windows based machine. MS Windows Vista introduced Segoe UI as its font.

Being that these systems (companies) like to make their web sites in the default font of their operating system, things don’t look the same on all platforms. What I think is strange is that Microsoft totally changed their web site, so it’s back to the ol’ fonts, but how much more does Microsoft look like it wants to be Apple anymore? Frankly, it’s embarrassing … but that’s another topic that will only be mentioned in passing in this post.

This WordPress theme that I’m using while this post was made (don’t know if I will or won’t change it) is made to resemble a Mac type interface. In doing this, the Lucida Grande font is selected to be displayed to visitors. If, however, you’re not a Mac visitor, you’re not going to see the Lucida Grande font just as if you went to http://www.apple.com … So what is the fall back? I chose Tahoma for my MS Windows brethren … I will also look into putting in Segoe UI so that Vista peeps will have a better experience in their viewing pleasure.

So there you have it, a system font is no longer a mono-spaced font used for interfacing with the intricacies of an operating system and its code, it’s now all about style …

PC vs. Mac

vista-dadmbp-dadMarch 5th, 2009 marked my father’s 75th birthday. On this day horror of horrors, he was experiencing yet another “computer problem.”

Over the course of time, I have found my father to be somewhat political so I picked an American looking theme for his blog. He being a former newsman, I liked the Courier font for him as well.

If you click on the screen shot on the left, you will see of what he was complaining. The screen shot is from my Windows Vista, and on the right, a screen shot from my MacBookPro. The CSS style sheet specified simply Courier as the leader in the font-family parameter. As you can see, it looked fine on my Mac, and that’s what I’m sure I used to setup his (and my) blog. In fact, I almost exclusively use the Mac for everything. Once you go Mac …

Also, look how sickly Courier looks on Windows Vista. What’s up with that? Looks fine on the Mac. I mean, Courier wasn’t deprecated, was it? Anyway, a simple change from Courier to "Courier New" made everything all better.

Poor Vista, and Happy Birthday, Dad!

Offline Rails API layout using RDoc’s RDOCOPT

UPDATE March 29, 2009: This was all solved using: 

template="jamis" rake doc:rails

Found on the blog by JamisBuck is the RDoc layout used online at api.rubyonrails.org. Simply acquire the file jamis.rb (posted here if you can’t find it elsewhere) and you’re covered with your Ruby Rdoc utilizing the instructions to append --template=jamis …

But what about Rails? rake doc:rails doesn’t like the --template=jamis argument.

RDOCOPT="-S -f html -T jamis" — Then run  rake doc:rails and your offline local API copy will look just like the online version.

Sure there may be other ways of accomplishing this, but this got the job done and will get the job done next time I want to build the latest Rails API. If you’re interested in a more permanent solution, look at setting up variables in your .gemrc file.