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Kieran Healy (kjhealy@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 07-Feb-2025 15:10:40 JST Kieran Healy

I needed something to distract me from the news and it turned out to be something even more miserable. https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/02/06/kerning-and-kerning-in-a-widening-gyre/
In conversation 2 months ago from mastodon.social permalink
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1. Dr Manhattan just wants his fonts to work properly in R
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  Kerning and Kerning in a Widening Gyre
  
  from Kieran Healy
  
  This post summarizes an extended period of deep annoyance. I have tried to solve the problem it describes more than once before and not quite done it. This has, in fact, happened again. I have still not satisfactorily solved the problem. But this time I know why I can’t solve it in a civilized manner. My goal is simple, and reasonable. I want to produce more or less identical plots in both PNG and PDF formats. PNG is a raster format. PDF is a vector format and also the Devil Incarnate. Sometimes you want one format, sometimes the other. Raster formats color in pixels on a grid of some fixed resolution. They are efficient when you need to plot a lot of elements but you can’t zoom in on them without loss. Vector formats can be easily resized up or down without loss of fidelity, but they get big real fast when you have a lot of objects to show, because each one is drawn separately, and also they are the Devil Incarnate. Especially when it comes to fonts.

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