Design notes

Book layout

Since 2013, Open Source Publishing (OSP) makes printed publications with web technologies: HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The use of these technologies allows for new kinds of layout and new publication pipelines where multiple output formats (website, book, ebook) can be produced based on the same content. The contents of this book were written in the Markdown markup language and synchronized between the authors and designers using Git, a collaborative tool. The sources were then transformed into HTML with Pelican CMS. The web version lets the reader view and live test the sample codes of each chapter. For the printed version of the book, the polyfill paged.js was used to augment browser support for styling paged media with CSS. Both versions are independent and complementary.

Fonts

All fonts of the book have been chosen because they were drawn with code.

Body and headers fonts used in this book are part of a larger font family drawn by A.V. Hershey in the 1960s and were developed specifically for vector plotters. Limited by the technical limitations of these plotters, curves are segmented into small, straight lines. Furthermore, as vector plotters draw using a single line width, varying line thickness is simulated by placing lines close to each other. The specific variants displayed in the book were reinterpreted with Metafont. The body fonts are from the Hershey Noailles family, interpreted by Antoine Gelgon, transforming the segmented curves into real curves. The Hershey Times in the headers was interpreted by Gijs de Heij and Simon Egli, (ab-)using Metafont’s “most pleasing curve” to generate its particular shapes.

The code samples are set in OCR-pbi, a font family drawn with Metafont by Antoine Gelgon. The skeleton of this font is based on the OCR-B, drawn by Adrian Frutiger in an effort to draw a monospace font readable by both machines and humans.