The film industry has used them perhaps since its inception to denote the year a film was made, so that it could be redistributed later either locally or to a foreign country with many not knowing the wiser; this became more useful when films were broadcast on television to prevent people from reacting against an older film. From this came the policy of the broadcasting industry, including the BBC, to use them to denote the year in which a television program was made (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has largely stopped this practice but still occasionally lapses).

If that really is the reason, I reckon it’s time for a rethink… doesn’t it seem silly to mask this information? The BBC use Roman numerals for copyright statements on the web too — consistancy is a good thing, but it seems a bit fusty.

I suppose to those with decent EPGs and chunks of programme meta-data available at the touch of a remote, this little whinge seems rather quaint — “Look! They have to wait ’till the end of a programme to find out when it was made, then translate the date from some weird arcane number system!”

Korean Alphabet Day (Hangul Nal in Korean) is on October 9th. It commemorates the publication of the Korean national alphabet, which was invented in 1443 and published in 1446 by King Sejong (Yi dynasty) and a group of scholars that he entrusted with this task (“Institute of Correct Sounds”).

The unique feature of the Korean alphabet is that it is directly iconic. The basic shapes of the consonants are based on the shapes of the speech organs when the sounds are being pronounced. Even distinctive features were recognized. It is thus a superb achievement of linguistic science, anticipating modern phonology by several centuries.

Since the Korean alphabet is so much easier to learn than the Chinese characters that had been the only writing system before, The Korean alphabet (Hangul) also had the effect of democratizing writing.

The options for choosing which characters of fonts to embed have been expanded in the new Flash MX 2004 (Flash 7). The font embedding problem I lost hair and hours over last month seems to be fixed with this new release. I’m happier now I can author on MacOS X and “get typography right”.

In a move to fill the last remaining gap in font display capabilities for open source software, the GNOME Foundation has reached an agreement with Bitstream (Nasdaq: BITS) to release fonts under an open source license. A total of ten serif, sans serif and monospaced fonts will be released under a special open source license, after they have been adapted to meet the requirements for technical use. The set of ten fonts will bring advanced font capabilities to all developers and users of free and open source software.

To celebrate the release, I’ve knocked-up a commemorate stylesheet for this site. I’ve called it “Duckworth”. You can switch to it on the style switching section of the customise page.

Once there was a typeface called Helvetica.

It was extremely popular.

Later came a software company called Microsoft.

They “borrowed” Helvetica for their operating system and called it Arial.

This inferior typeface is now on millions of desktops all over the world.

Can you tell the difference between the original and the rip-off in these ten examples?

I got 8/10. Slipping.

I’ve been messing about with the Fontographeresque PfaEdit a bit recently. I dusted off a few half-baked fonts I started at college (last modified 1993!) with the intention of tidying them up, converting then to OpenType and posting them on my fonts page. They’ll be there within the next ten years or so.