Beautiful lecture. As with a lot of things that shape our everyday life we forget to contemplate their qualities. For example fonts subtly impact how we perceive, understand, feel about any text yet we fail to give it much thought as Etienne points out. A shape of a letter, especially in math papers, can influence how "beautiful" and understandable the proof is. Really appreciate that Knuth spent years building LaTeX so that compsci and math papers could be formatted as beautiful PDFs and not published as Word documents
I practice calligraphy as a hobby and took on an online course[1]. This was specifically for the Trajan hand (which is a favourite of mine but which I still can't do very well). The first exercise was to write each letter on a large grid on a sheet of A4 paper. One letter on one sheet of paper on a large square grid. Every serif, every curve, the points at which various parts of the letter fit together, widths of various strokes etc. all got magnified. I did this for a long time and imbibed a lot.
Now, I can see those patterns when I look at lettering in public places and many aspects and it enhances the beauty in many subtle pleasing ways.
Also, when I write (using a dip pen and calligraphic ink), all the things he mentions about embossing, the texture of the letters etc are all things that I enjoy. The smell of the ink, the texture of the paper, the scratchy sounds while writing. It's a very sensual experience and something I treasure deeply.
Absolutely. Interestingly, if there's a paper and it's not typeset in LaTeX, I can't help but start predjudiced. "Is this a Word document? These are not serious people."
Beautiful lecture. As with a lot of things that shape our everyday life we forget to contemplate their qualities. For example fonts subtly impact how we perceive, understand, feel about any text yet we fail to give it much thought as Etienne points out. A shape of a letter, especially in math papers, can influence how "beautiful" and understandable the proof is. Really appreciate that Knuth spent years building LaTeX so that compsci and math papers could be formatted as beautiful PDFs and not published as Word documents
I couldn't agree with you more.
I practice calligraphy as a hobby and took on an online course[1]. This was specifically for the Trajan hand (which is a favourite of mine but which I still can't do very well). The first exercise was to write each letter on a large grid on a sheet of A4 paper. One letter on one sheet of paper on a large square grid. Every serif, every curve, the points at which various parts of the letter fit together, widths of various strokes etc. all got magnified. I did this for a long time and imbibed a lot.
Now, I can see those patterns when I look at lettering in public places and many aspects and it enhances the beauty in many subtle pleasing ways.
Also, when I write (using a dip pen and calligraphic ink), all the things he mentions about embossing, the texture of the letters etc are all things that I enjoy. The smell of the ink, the texture of the paper, the scratchy sounds while writing. It's a very sensual experience and something I treasure deeply.
It's something I could talk about forever.
Footnotes:
1. https://www.yvesletermeletters.com/trajan-online-course.html
Absolutely. Interestingly, if there's a paper and it's not typeset in LaTeX, I can't help but start predjudiced. "Is this a Word document? These are not serious people."
There is also typst, which is amazing to work with and looks amazing
He was also interviewed on RFI recently [0] (in French).
[0] https://www.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/de-vive-s-voix/20260401-etien...
French + fonts = B612 @ https://github.com/polarsys/b612