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  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,736
    O'Reilly did publish a comprehensive book about fonts called Fonts & Encodings, by Yannis Haralamous. Unfortunately, at least in the English edition (it was originally published in French), every time a negative number is used in code-formatted text, only the minus sign is shown--the numeric portion is missing. Apparently, something went wrong when the book was formatted. It's a very good book otherwise, but this flaw hampers its usefulness. As far as I know, they have not issued a corrected edition.
  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 747
    I've spoken to the folks at O'Reilly and they are not planning on doing a new edition of Fonts and Encodings. The cost involved in getting the book through production (obviously a book about fonts required more specialized production than their usual process) was not seen as worth the benefit given fairly meagre sales.

    I'm very slowly working on a book called Fonts and Layout For Global Scripts, which I hope to be a more modern (and less Latin-focused) replacement, but recently have got sidetracked writing a different book for my day job. Contributions to Fonts and Layout are welcome.
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,736
    I've spoken to the folks at O'Reilly and they are not planning on doing a new edition of Fonts and Encodings.

    That's really too bad. I was hoping they would at least issue a corrected edition in electronic format. What a waste. But, as you say, it's ten years old now.
  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 747
    I was hoping they would at least issue a corrected edition in electronic format. What a waste. But, as you say, it's ten years old now.
    Well, it was recently converted to electronic format and has been republished on their Safari platform. (For a long time it was only available as PDF but is now an honest-to-goodness ebook.) But you are right - it still has the negative-numbers problem:


  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,889
    There are quite a few other errors in Fonts and Encodings, unfortunately. Could have been a great book, but just too error-riddled.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,430
    I recall some discussions with Yannis to liberate the text under a Creative Common libre license. Did anything come of that?
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 364
    I guess you would have to discuss that with the publisher, not the author.
  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 747
    edited December 2017
    I did talk with ORA about this. My contact in O’Reilly asked around to see if there would be any chance of this, but “so far the answers have all been ‘no’.” (Not sure why - that’s all I got.)

    On the other hand I don’t think much of the material has aged well. Chapters about TeX fonts and Mac OS 9 aren’t particularly relevant any more, and a book like that today should have much more coverage of global scripts. That’s why I decided to start again from scratch, and that also gives you the advantage of a consistent writing style.

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