To give an example, there are currently two types of books you can buy on the nook: those that are left-aligned, and those that are justified.

Here’s the left alignment. It’s readable, but it wastes a lot of space on the right edge and isn’t very aesthetic. Next we have the justified version:

This kind of very basic justification is pretty poor looking—in attempting to create a nice straight margin, it adds a bunch of ugly space between words. This is the same kind of justification web browsers do, and almost nobody uses it because it looks so bad. I knew about this going in. Science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer wrote a very informative post about it, and I set about finding a way to solve this problem before my nook even arrived in the mail.

One great feature about the nook is that it supports viewing PDFs, with and without re-flowing text. With re-flowing turned off, you’re free to manually typeset the document any way you want, and it will appear exactly how you want on the screen. This is what I was looking for. With this you can use Microsoft Word to create a great looking PDF. If you’re feeling brave and want even better looking text, professional typesetting software like Adobe InDesign provides more advanced features that will give fantastic results.

Here we can see proper hyphenation and justification. A good justification algorithm won’t just add more space between words, but will also be willing to shrink it just slightly if it will make things look better. You can see this in the first line of text, where it fits “adipiscing” in to remove the whitespace that plagued the text in the previous image. It also evenly spaces the entire paragraph at once instead of just a single line, and fits more text into each line by hyphenating words on line breaks.

It’s looking pretty good now, and is almost like a real book. But there’s a little more that can be done:

Can you spot the difference? I admit, without a keen eye and a little knowledge of typography, I won’t expect most people to. Here’s an animation to help show the differences better:

There are two things happening here, one more subtle than the other. The first is optical margin adjustment. This improves aesthetics by adjusting each line’s margins ever so slightly to reduce empty space, giving a more flat look to edges. You can see it on the fifth line, where it compensates for the empty space under the V’s left edge by moving it out a little bit. It’s even more noticeable with punctuation on the right edge, where it pushes the periods and hyphens out into the margin.

The second thing happening is ligature substitution. Certain combinations of characters have similar fine details in the same spots and can look a little awkward together, and ligatures can make them look better by combining them into a single specialized glyph. You can see this in the middle left of the text, where “officae” is slightly altered—look closely at the “ffi” and you will see the three letters merged together with the first F becoming a little smaller and the dot over the I merging with the second F to create a slightly larger overhang. Look in your favorite dead tree book, and you’ll probably find it in “ff” and “fi” combinations—it’s pretty hard to notice without looking for it, but it is used to subtly improve legibility.

There is nothing about EPUBs that prevent e-readers from performing this kind of typesetting automatically. With any luck, one day we’ll get this nice look in all the e-books we can download. The fault is solely within the e-reader’s software. Until they start to take typesetting seriously, the only way we’ll get this is with PDFs. Unfortunately, most e-books aren’t legally available without DRM, making this kind of dramatic alteration impossible with most of the stuff you can buy.

It’s easy to say this isn’t very important. After all, it doesn’t affect functionality, right? You can still read the first picture! When you’re doing a lot of reading, it is important. Proper text flow reduces eye movement and takes less work for your brain to process, letting you read longer and faster. It also happens to get significantly more text onto each page, which means fewer delays from page turns—in my experience, it reduces a book’s page count by around 15%.

There are a lot of compelling reasons to get an e-reader. They can store thousands of books at once and remember your place in each one of them. You can look up unknown words in a dictionary, and bookmark stuff for later reference without drawing all over a page with a highlighter. You can browse through massive book stores and read bought books instantly without ever leaving your home. It baffles me that they don’t bother to improve the single most important part of the device—reading!

I took it to the next level tonight, though, by traveling into the future to see Green Day’s New Years Eve concert at LA Live. Well, sort-of. NBC was filming the concert with Carson Daly as the host. They gave us all new years hats and had us all count down from 30 as if the ball was dropping on New Years Eve. Apparently they’ll air this then. TV Magic!

After the count down, Green Day came on with a “Happy fucking New Year!” and rocked the stage for the rest of the night. Their performance was complete with explosions, fireworks, and a good mix between their newer stuff and the older stuff I was listening to on tape when I was eight years old (holy crap) in elementary school. Better yet, a friend I hadn’t seen in ages was down to visit family for the week, so I met her and her brothers there and caught up. Good times!

Opening for them was The Dead Trees and The Features. I had heard of neither, but they both put on great sets of their own — I bought their CDs right after the show.

If you’ve never heard The Whigs before, they are giving out two songs from their upcoming CD “In The Dark” for free from their website.

Our server normally takes away your medkits at the start of the match to make it more difficult, but after three tries on advanced we decided we needed them to complete the level. There was some room left so I included some amusing moments from our failed attempts at the end.

The map still isn’t finished yet, but it’s getting really close. A beta should be out very soon for everyone to play. As always, you can download the campaign from L4Dmaps.

You’ve probably noticed this on websites everywhere, but have come to accept it. Depending on your browser and operating system, you can probably see it in the title here. This problem is solved in Windows 7 with the introduction of DirectWrite, which combines ClearType’s horizontal anti-aliasing with regular vertical anti-aliasing when using large font sizes:

Of course, DirectWrite affects more than just Latin characters. Any glyphs with very slight angles will see a huge benefit, such as hiragana:

Unfortunately, this isn’t a free upgrade. For whatever reason, Microsoft didn’t make all the old GDI functions use DirectWrite’s improvements so to make use of this, all your old GDI and DrawText code will need to be upgraded to use Direct2D and DirectWrite directly, so an old WM_PAINT procedure like this:

PAINTSTRUCT ps;
HDC hdc = BeginPaint(hwnd, &ps);

HFONT font = CreateFont(-96, 0, 0, 0, FW_NORMAL,
                        0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, L"Calibri");

SelectObject(hdc, (HGDIOBJ)font);

RECT rc;
GetClientRect(hwnd, &rc);

DrawText(hdc, L"Int64.org", 9, &rc,
         DT_SINGLELINE | DT_CENTER | DT_VCENTER);

EndPaint(hwnd, &ps);

Will turn into this:

ID2D1Factory *d2df;

D2D1CreateFactory(D2D1_FACTORY_TYPE_SINGLE_THREADED,
   __uuidof(ID2D1Factory), 0, (void**)&d2df);

IDWriteFactory *dwf;

DWriteCreateFactory(DWRITE_FACTORY_TYPE_SHARED,
   __uuidof(IDWriteFactory), (IUnknown**)&dwf);

IDWriteTextFormat *dwfmt;

dwf->CreateTextFormat(L"Calibri", 0, DWRITE_FONT_WEIGHT_REGULAR,
   DWRITE_FONT_STYLE_NORMAL, DWRITE_FONT_STRETCH_NORMAL,
   96.0f, L"en-us", &dwfmt);

dwfmt->SetTextAlignment(DWRITE_TEXT_ALIGNMENT_CENTER);
dwfmt->SetParagraphAlignment(DWRITE_PARAGRAPH_ALIGNMENT_CENTER);

RECT rc;
GetClientRect(hwnd, &rc);

D2D1_SIZE_U size = D2D1::SizeU(rc.right - rc.left,
                               rc.bottom - rc.top);

ID2D1HwndRenderTarget *d2drt;

d2df->CreateHwndRenderTarget(D2D1::RenderTargetProperties(),
   D2D1::HwndRenderTargetProperties(hwnd, size), &d2drt);

ID2D1SolidColorBrush *d2db;

d2drt->CreateSolidColorBrush(D2D1::ColorF(D2D1::ColorF::Black),
   &d2db);

D2D1_SIZE_F layoutSize = d2drt->GetSize();
D2D1_RECT_F layoutRect = D2D1::RectF(0.0, 0.0,
   layoutSize.width, layoutSize.height);

d2drt->BeginDraw();
d2drt->DrawText(L"Int64.org", 9, dwfmt, layoutRect, d2db);
d2drt->EndDraw();

This is no small change, and considering this API won’t work on anything but Vista and Windows 7, you’ll be cutting out a lot of users if you specialize for it. While you could probably make a clever DrawText wrapper, Direct2D and DirectWrite are really set up to get you the most benefit if you’re all in. Hopefully general libraries like Pango and Cairo will get updated backends for it.

DirectWrite has other benefits too, like sub-pixel rendering. When you render text in GDI, glyphs will always get snapped to pixels. If you have two letters side by side, it will choose to always start the next letter 1 or 2 pixels away from the last — but what if the current font size says it should actually be a 1.5 pixel distance? In GDI, this will be rounded to 1 or 2. This is also noticeable with kerning, which tries to remove excessive space between specific glyphs such as “Vo”. Because of this, most of the text you see in GDI is very slightly warped. It’s much more apparent when animating, where it causes the text to have a wobbling effect as it constantly snaps from one pixel to the next instead of smoothly transitioning between the two.

DirectWrite’s sub-pixel rendering helps to alleviate this by doing exactly that: glyphs can now start rendering at that 1.5 pixel distance, or any other point in between. Here you can see the differing space between the ‘V’ and ‘o’, as well as a slight difference between the ‘o’s with DirectWrite on the right side, because they are being rendered on sub-pixel offsets:

The difference between animating with sub-pixel rendering and without is staggering when we view it in motion:

Prior to DirectWrite the normal way to animate like this was to render to a texture with monochrome anti-aliasing (that is, without ClearType), and transform the texture while rendering. The problem with that is the transform will introduce a lot of imperfections without expensive super-sampling, and of course it won’t be able to use ClearType. With DirectWrite you get pixel-perfect ClearType rendering every time.

Apparently WPF 4 is already using Direct2D and DirectWrite to some degree, hopefully there will be high-quality text integrated in Flash’s future. Firefox has also been looking at adding DirectWrite support, but I haven’t seen any news of Webkit (Chrome/Safari) or Opera doing the same. It looks like Firefox might actually get it in before Internet Explorer. Edit: looks like Internet Explorer 9 will use DirectWrite — wonder which will go gold with the feature first?

Direct2D and DirectWrite are included in Windows 7, but Microsoft has backported them in the Platform Update for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista so there’s no reason people who are sticking with Vista should be left out. Are there people sticking with Vista?

I watched The Plan on Blu-ray today. In it, you follow two Cavils while they plot and execute their plan to destroy humanity. It takes a lot of the memorable moments of suspense from the miniseries and season one — when you knew something was happening but weren’t given all the details, or when you suspected someone of being a Cylon, etc. — and expands them to show you what was really happening using a lot of old material is used to seamlessly transition into the Cylons’ point of view.

I’m really sad to say that the only part I liked about The Plan was Dean Stockwell’s frakkin’ amazing acting and Bear’s equally great score. The Plan has a lot of problems. First and foremost is that it’s literally a recap of the miniseries and season one — there’s no new story. If I had to guess, 25 to 50% of the scenes were actually old aired footage. Another problem is that all those great moments lost their suspense by being expanded. And the last major problem is that the new material focuses on the “bad” Cylons. This seems like a really great idea at first, but what I quickly realized is that the TV show never made us connect with them and as a result I had trouble caring at all about their scenes. Most of the time I was just hoping my favorite human characters or “good” Cylons would get on screen and give me all those little interactions I talked about.

Purely as a BSG geek, there was some interesting new information to learn. But bottom line? I was bored. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. I’m really sorry to say it too, because I and so many others were looking forward to it.

During the making of the video we couldn’t stop playing around as hunters. The area quickly reminded me of some of the freestyle trick maps for Quake where there is no particular goal, only at lot of stuff to play with. We began making tricks more and more complex and were having so much fun that I recorded a few of them for the start of the video. Despite consisting of a mere three pounces, the middle jump was by far the hardest to pull off, requiring snap aim, timing, and air control all within a quick few seconds.

Valve’s original idea for Left 4 Dead was to make it a game of who survived the longest, not who survived. They didn’t go through with that idea, but it’s one that we’ve always liked. One of the first decisions Soul made when creating this campaign is that it would be much harder than Valve’s campaigns. Even experienced teams shouldn’t expect to survive without some really excellent strategy and teamwork. I know a lot of players seem to think that fun means winning and winning means never dying and finishing with a score of 8000 to 300, so this map might not appeal to all crowds. For people who enjoy a real challenge, I think this campaign will have a lot to offer.

If any mappers, modelers, or texture artists are out there, Soul could use your help! He’s chosen such a different art design that most of Left 4 Dead’s pre-made stuff isn’t going to work.

The first level of the map can currently be downloaded from L4Dmaps. This second level is about 80% of the way toward a basic beta version.

Apparently there is now real talk of cancelling Dollhouse mid-season. I can’t say I’m surprised. People have blamed the Friday night death slot, while others blame losing Terminator: TSCC as a lead in.

Myself, I just don’t think it’s a good show. I’m a huge fan of Joss’ other shows — Buffy, Angel, and Firefly were all frakkin’ fantastic, along with all of the comics. Dollhouse just doesn’t cut it, though. I really can see the potential for an interesting story, but it has thus far been taking the irritating Lost approach of only spending 5 minutes of every episode to advance the overall story. This might work in Lost, but with Dollhouse introducing new characters (though played by the same people) every week it becomes very hard to invest in.

Most fans agree that the DVD-only budget episode “Epitaph One” is the best in the whole last season, and that doesn’t do much of any help if it was only on DVD. I had hope that season 2 would quickly advance the storyline into something more like “Epitaph One”, but so far we’ve just had more wasted monster-of-the-week time. Terminator: TSCC was an incredible show, I think much better than Dollhouse, and it really saddens me to know it died for this. Unfortunately due to the way TV is filmed so far ahead of when it airs, there’s not much quick adjusting that can be done to save it either.

Should Dollhouse be saved? I think Joss would eventually be able to pick up the pieces to make it interesting, but I can’t help wonder if it would be best to just cut it now and let him move on to something new. Preferably with more Amy Acker hint hint.