Hola LyXers,
Background: Nigh onto 20 years ago I read the Pulitzer prize
winning, "Godel, Escher and Bach", by Douglas Hofstadter.
He followed this by "Metamagical Themas" and in chapter 13,
took issue with Donald Knuth's expectation for the future of
TeX and Metafont. [See Myhill's characterization of creativity.]
"Knuth proposed that a single set of algorithms could describe
the basic alphabetic letterforms. As Douglas Hofstadter later
commented, Knuth held out a "tantalizing prospect [.]: that
with the arrival of computers, we can now approach the vision
of a unification of all typefaces."
"Hofstadter argued that letters belong to what are called
"productive sets" --sets which cannot ever be "complete"
since they are by definition comprised of each and every
instantiation. Not only do an infinite number of "a's"
exist, but determining precisely what their common features
are -- or the properties of "consistency" in mathematical
terms -- is more complicated than it seems."
Gary McGraw used fonts and this debate as the subject
for his Phd. thesis, Letter Spirit. Now to the point of this
post. When I downloaded the thesis or maybe one of his
papers, it was in .ps format which was a bit to feint. So
I converted it to pdf. The document came out with all the
pages in reverse order. This has happened to me a few times.
You have to scroll to the end of the document and then read
backwards towards the beginning. You get to the bottom of the
page and then you have to reverse tread over what you have read.
This is not the only time this has happen.
Solution: http://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html
Free PDFill PDF Tools [comes bundled with a trial dl.]
Option #2: Split or Reorder PDF pages [I reversed all.]
Next problem: With Acrobat Reader, it has started displaying
with two pages per window, I think called "facing" while I like
"continuous" so I don't have to left and right arrow, just down.
Solution: Free Foxit Reader for Windows, about 1mb. You can
remove that annoying Acrobat Reader advertisement. It uses the
large "continuous" by default disply not the two-page AR 58%
display. One can also change the color of the text. [Linux has xpdf.]
Probably you thought that I was going to lead up to something
profoundly philosphical ... like drawing a deep metaphor about the
problem of generating aesthetically pleasing fonts mechanically,
was like a life problem in balancing and distinguishing boundaries
in personal relationships. But no, this is yet another practical post
leaning towards academic readers suffering from the challenges of
character recognition, with a bit of tribute to the roots of TeX/LyX.
Is water under the bridge the same water,
Stephen
