The Not-So-Rapid Blog

I am, occasionally, a type nut.

That is to say, I like typography. Well, the typeface end of it, anyway. A good typeface is a wonderful thing to behold.

I've got a large collection of fonts at home - a hundred or so that I like very much, and which have followed me around from PC to PC at home. (For those that aren't aware, a font is a subset of a typeface - a specific rendering of a style or size within the typeface family.)

But recently, I've been using Bitstream's Vera quite a bit. Especially on my work's PC.

Vera has been donated to the world by Bitstream, free to copy and redistribute. OpenOffice.org's Suite comes with it, and it's used in recent versions of Gnome and KDE and therefore is available in most places.

It's a nice crisp set of fonts. Bitstream did a great job in providing not only Serif and Sans Serif versions, but also a Sans Mono, which is an ideal programming / terminal font, owing to its clear distinctions between O and 0, and 1 and l.

(That was a capital o, a zero, a one, and then a lowercase l. If you weren't sure, then you shouldn't program in whatever font you're using right now!)

My entire Windows theme now uses Vera, as does Notes and a few other apps I have. Switching fonts for your UI is not a light step to take, but I've found it to be quite pleasant with Vera. It's certainly worth a try for those that are curious.

Vera is not the best font I've ever seen. (Fonts are things you use for specific purposes in an ideal world, so I don't really have a "best font".) But it is very nice for general purpose usage, especially in user interfaces on computer screens. It also looks pretty good when printed, too.

Anyone who can't see where this is leading - get to the back of the class!

I've checked the screenshots of Hannover that Mary Beth has provided on her blog. And I saw Arial. Or at least, that's what it looks like.

BLAST! Arial's fine on computer screens, but not so hot when printed. Whilst I don't hate Arial, I do find it jarring at larger point sizes, and dislike a couple of points in its design. And Arial is only available on Windows, which is my biggest beef - I'd like to be using the same font across all platforms, if possible. Hence my current preference for Vera...

And anyway, we've lived with a slightly sucky font performance from Notes for years now! Let's get this fixed!

This is, of course, a legacy issue. A problem that came in from a time when there was a client for Windows, OS/2, AIX/Solaris/HP-UX and Mac. Each of those four main platforms (I'm lumping the Unixes as one for simplicity) had its own font systems, none of which were quite the same. Even where they were similar, the differences were big enough to see with the naked eye, so Notes had to do something to retain a consistent look across platforms.

With four main platforms to serve, Iris had an innovative solution - they created "virtual fonts" for Notes. When you work in Notes, you've probably noticed that the default fonts for editing in Rich Text are simply called Default Sans Serif, Default Serif, and Default Monospace. (And Default User Interface and Default Multilingual, but they're not used so much.)

Notes basically picks a font on each platform to act as these fonts. On Windows, it's a 9 point Arial for the Default Sans Serif, for instance. The idea is that on each platform, you should get a similar looking font at a similar weight - thus freeing developers (and users) from having to think about multi-platform font issues, and allowing them to get on with putting text on the screen rather than wondering how it might look on another platform. Leave just a little padding to account for any tiny weight differences, and you'll be fine...

I'll give Notes its credit here. In a time where the idea of cross-p latform compatibility was a joke, this was actually a pretty good system. Remember, back then the closest we had to a multi-platform file format as good old plain text files. And even then, UNIX like to use a different line separator... In a time when the idea of data looking the same on any platform was a mere pipedream for many, Notes was doing its best to provide it. And doing far better than most others, too!

Then came the web. And the death of UNIX on the client side. And the death of the Mac as a platform. And OS /2 didn't so much as die, but barely had a chance to live anyway.

And we found ourselves with just two clients. Windows, and a slightly less loved Mac version which was always along late to the party.

But the font system remained unchanged. It still served. Silently. Unappreciated. Occasionally maligned by those that had cause to notice it.

Things have moved on, though. For instance, we're now up to Web 3.0, with Web 4.0 scheduled to ship early next February. (Venture capital willing, that is.)

And cross-platform typography is improving. Other projects outside of Notes have discovered a need to have fonts represented properly everywhere they go. Bitstream's donation of Vera is an excellent example of this - originally intended for the Gnome project, OpenOffice.org grabbed it too, and that's certainly why the PC I'm typing this on now has the font available.

So if OpenOffice can use the same font across multiple OSes, why can't Notes? Especially as it's running inside Eclipse...

Actually, I can think of a couple of reasons.

The first is that different platforms can have different numbers of dots-per-inch (DPI) in their interfaces, which makes things complicated. The number of dots-per-inch assumed by the display driver naturally has a huge effect on the size of everything being displayed, especially vector-based information like type.

Windows has a standard DPI of 96, moving to 120 if you use Large Fonts. The Mac, being slinky and elegant, has a DPI of 72. And X Windows - well, who knows? The most common setting is 96, which happens to match Windows. But it could be anything.

Differing DPIs are the kinds of complications that the Notes system was designed to work around originally, and some kind of compensation may be necessary - in Eclipse or in Notes itself - when switching from platform to platform. This doesn't change from the current situation, and a standard all-platform font like Vera would be an improvement but will not solve this problem. The big question is how that affects prioritising this kind of change for the Notes developers...

The second problem is the lack of a unicode version of Vera. That will be trickier to work around, really. However, the default Unicode Font will probably be different on most platforms regardless.

In an ideal world, IBM would simply make the investment and buy a unicode version of Vera from Bitstream to redistribute with Notes. Actually, that's not true - in an ideal world, IBM would ask Bitstream nicely if they would donate a unicode version, both Serif and Sans-Serif, in the same manner, ands Bitstream would be generous yet again.

That would rock, roll, and quite probably twist a bit too. However, I doubt it has even occurred to IBM, and Bitstream have already been more than generous with Vera anyway, so it's probably not going to happen.

So IBM might have to decide whether they want to either buy in a good unicode font for the purpose, or just use whatever they can find on each platform and lump it. Personally, I can live with unicode looking a little different from platform to platform for a while, providing that the same font is used for non-unicode (western) text across each platform. However, IBM are a global company and might not feel the same. Just as with the DPI problem, this will affect how high a priority IBM places this issue.

&nb sp;

Because of those two problems, I don't expect IBM to do anything about this anytime soon. Frankly, I'd be quite surprised to see anything turn up in R9, let alone get pushed into R8 given how late into the development cycle they are right now. Which is a shame - a good cross-platform client should have good cross-platform fonts to work with.

Still, we can hope. And I doubt anyone has really thought about this since the R4.6 days, when they began consolidation towards Windows-only Notes clients.

So by getting this off my chest and into my blog, I'm hoping someone bright in IBM will start thinking about this. We're not quite at the multi-platform client stage anyway, so there's no great rush. It's a nice-to-have, a bit of polish on the chrome that is Eclipse.

The font doesn't have to be Vera, by the way. If IBM have some other nice font family in mind, that would be cool too. But Vera's very nice. I think Notes should shack up with her. I also think that you should all go and fetch a copy of Vera, as you might like it. Especially the coders, who will like the monospaced version!

Here's hoping...

One of the user-based bugbears in Notes has been, for a long time, the Out Of Office agent.

Users just don't understand why it works the way it does, and even if you explain why it runs that way, they're not going to be impressed.

(Why does it wait hours to respond? Scalability. Imagine running an agent every time an email is delivered. That's easy. Now imagine doing it for 10,000 mailboxes on one server. Domino can host that many mailboxes, easily, on the right hardware. It can't run that many agents concurrently. The current out of office system is designed for customisation, flexibility and scalability. Not for speed of execution.)

Heck, the other day, I was fairly surprised when, after explaining briefly that it runs that way because the product is designed for such scalability, a new user just srhugged and said "makes sense - thanks". Fair bowled me over, that did!

But Domino 8 changes this. In Domino 8, the Out Of Office replies can be generated by the router.

Hurrah! Because let's face it, the old system was a legacy one designed in a time when servers didn't have the computational power available to perform complicated Out Of Office calculations every time an email was delivered. Over a year ago, I was talking about how this could be improved, and I'm really glad to see that IBM has people even smarter than me.

I'm not going to claim any credit for this advance, you see. Firstly, I don't know exactly how they've implemented this new functionality.

Personally, having had more time to think about it, I've changed my mind on how I'd implement it - rather than build a custom rule, I'd just hard-code the functionality into the router and read the profile document fields for the Out Of Office information. That would be faster, smarter and allow you to expand the future functionality without mucking about banging your head against the limits of your Mail Rules implementation.

But if they've done it via mail rules, that's cool.

What's even cooler is that the Out Of Office replies are even smarter than before. In fact, according to the presentation that Craig links to, the Router also stops sending the messages automatically at the end of the Out Of Office period, supports delegation, and can send one message per person or a response to every mail.

Now, that could be one very fancy mail rule they've built there - but it seems to me that it might take a while to evaluate such an @Formula, so perhaps this is hardcoded into the router?

The second reason I'm not going to claim I had any great influence over all of this is that, frankly, it was all a bit obvious. Other systems have been working this way for a while now, proving the capability is there in hardware these days. And even to say "great minds think alike" seems a bit rude - if I had a mind that great, I'd be writing code for Domino R8, not blog entries on it!

One of the strengths of Domino and Notes has always been that the same code (database system, replication engine, text handling) is used on both server and client. Although R8 is primarily client-driven, the Out Of Office agent in an excellent example of how client improvements are driving server improvements, and how IBM is listening to users. They're doing this the right way, rather than just prettying up the old system or throwing in a hack of some kind.

About the only problem with this is that you have to upgrade your server to get it - but at least you can do that in-place on the same hardware, so I don't see that as a problem really. More business as usual.

Despite it being more of a client-facing release, which will see little improvement in the Designer and Administration clients, I'm pretty excited about the Domino R8 server. The fact that it's overshadowed by the R8 client is more a reflection of how much good work has gone into moving to Eclipse, rather than how little work has gone into Domino.

I can't wait for R8!

A while ago, I said I was changing my commenting rules to reduce blog spam. I'm pleased to say that this seems to have worked - despite not having looked at my blocked comments queue for two weeks, I had  mere 500 bits of spam in it.

Which isn't bad at all.

I am astonished at just how many stupid spam bots will keep trying, though. Even after their first comment is blocked. I'm almost tempted to publicly name specific IP addresses, not that it would do much good. More as a sort of venting exercise. One spam comment being blocked should be a clue, two should be a sign to give up. By the twentieth, I'd sort of expect you to have figured it out. Ah well.

And I also noticed a subtle shift - some of my comment spam is now in German. I have no idea why. Still, if Volker wants some viagra, I know an IP address that can get him the best deals, apparently...

(In case you're wondering where I suddenly found the time to blog, I'm off ill today - having just recovered from a migraine that started at about four this morning. )

I'm still here.

I'd like to say I've had a lack of time recently, but that's not quite true.

I've had a lack of ability to prioritise my time.

December is upon us. It's time for drinks, and merriment. Which gives me even less time for the various things I wanted to do as well. Priorities, priorities, priorities!

I did notice a general trend recently towards the Getting Things Done methodology in the blogosphere recently. I think I might have a look at that, as my prioritisation could well be off-base.

Unless, of course, prioritising merriment over blogging is right.

I think it probably is, but if I'm wrong then I ask your forgiveness. I'll try to make a little more time in the coming weeks, but I can't make any promises!