Another boring observation on font hinting in Mac OS X

When you put a size threshold on font smoothing and make the text smaller than that, at least in Safari, you do appear to get the full TrueType hinting, not the subtler antialiased-font hinting. But the font metrics are not the metrics associated with the fully hinted font but the same metrics used for the antialiased font, so the spacing looks slightly drunken and cramped (it's the inverse of the problem I mentioned in my old MacEdition article, in which some old apps were using metrics with full TrueType hinting but Quartz antialiased rendering).

But the difference between the letterforms with and without antialiasing is not as great as I expected, and perhaps not as great as it used to be in early Mac OS X revs. It might be that Apple's modern font renderer is paying attention to the TrueType hint bytecodes when hinting for antialiased rendering, but just using a slightly more relaxed algorithm for grid-fitting. If so, they're being very clever.

Catalog numbers

In pompe's discussion on worldbuilding in RPGs and science fiction, we talked about the danger of just picking names for your space-opera setting off of a star map, since the bright stars that have names are pretty unusual and tend to be short-lived monsters.

That reminded me of a pet peeve of mine: when science-fiction writers want to indicate a star or asteroid or planet with a technical-sounding alphabet-soup designation, they rarely make it consistent with the ways in which this is actually done in practice today. It's not that hard, but seems uncommon. If I ever see a fictional alphabet-soup asteroid referred to as, say, "2012 LM349", or for that matter a star referred to as a string of digits beginning with HD, I will applaud, right there on the spot.

Granted, if the story is set in some future society, nomenclature may have changed; and there are about a zillion completely different star catalogs that list specific kinds of stars. But you can still avoid doing things that don't make any sense. For instance, planets and moons that are given some sort of ordinal letter or number designation are likely to get them more in order of discovery than in order of distance from the primary; that way they don't all have to be changed whenever somebody discovers another one. And, please, don't just give something an unadorned Greek letter for a name; there aren't that many Greek letters.