Raph Levien

If you haven't heard of him, the joke's on you. Maybe. In any case, his work is worth looking into.

He has done interesting work in font creation, font building primitives, rasterization, 2D drawing, and resistant social network graphs (which turns out to be more or less equivalent to the Old Sk00l Google Juice system).

He was recently instrumental in performing a wonderful experiment in editor building -- wonderful because of the way it failed. It was something that one would think would work, but somehow it didn't. It's always interesting when intelligent and well-informed people are wrong about something. Perhaps there was too much Design and too little boring boiler plate.

https://levien.com/

https://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

https://levien.com/phd/phd.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodipodi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato

https://raphlinus.github.io/xi/2020/06/27/xi-retrospective.html

This is a great paper, will likely move the state of the art forward. I've been aware of Kubelka-Munk representations of painting surfaces since [1], which used a six-dimensional space (scattering and absorption for 3 wavelength bands, not really spectral). Doing it all in RGB makes it way more practical.

I'm fiddling with an alternative approach based on IPT-like color spaces, which won't need the 10MB lookup table, and will have a tunable parameter for paint opacity (between watercolors and pastels). So far I have promising but not compelling results. If people are working on, say, a free software painting application, get in touch.

[1]: https://www.levien.com/gimp/wetdream.html

Looks interesting. Really wish I could download it now. I definitely want to see it when it's done, but how will know when that is? If I had even a beta version to play with I'm much more likely to remember to check for updates later.

That said, I'm really happy to see more programming fonts! I love Inconsolata[1] and used to use it for everything. However, recently I've been using Source Code Pro[2] and can't break myself away from it.

[1]: http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
[2]: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcecodepro.adobe/

This is wonderful news. Spiro splines are very cool, but I never considered them a real option for any projects I was working on because of the licensing issue. Hobby splines were the patent unencumbered next best choice as far as I could tell, but Spiro semantics always seemed incrementally preferable.

Raph's thesis on splines is a fun read:
https://www.levien.com/phd/thesis.pdf

And the original paper on Hobby splines:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2FBF02187690.pdf

Not AFAIA, though that's possible.

The original concept didn't have that.

Another approach was tried by Advogato, which had a "trust root" (ultimately Raph Levien). It was based around individuals rather than content and ... that also has issues. Nothing pathologically bad in the case of Advogato, though the site largely languished.

For Levien's concept, see http://www.levien.com/thesis/compact.pdf

dillo-0.1.0 release notes from March 2000:

> * Changed the licence to GPL. (Raph agreed on that)

So it's probably just a typo in the article. Intended point is that the license was changed from Gzilla's private copyright notice[1] to the GPL of the time, which would probably be v2.

Nonetheless Dillo's code is also licensed under GPLv3 now.

1: https://levien.com/gzilla/Copying.txt