Sorry, I should have said right after the rightmost tab. On my current Firefox it's a angle bracket, on other verions it's a pluss button or a blank button.

Firefox has a IMO more useful shortcut: Middle click with the mouse over the area right next to the rightmost tab will open the last closed tab.

Since I close tabs using the mouse I find it more convenient than reaching for the keyboard.

You can also close tabs with middle click, which is how I discovered the feature.

Why are grammar nazis always so rude?

It does stop casual use of my nett :)

It's probably brain to body size.

The Neanderthals had bigger brains than us (and so does elephants), but our brains are larger compared to our bodies.

That's one hour less for porn :)

And no I'm not trolling, I really am that lazy.

I'm still using WEP for the simple reason that I would have to update several devices settings, and I'm too lazy for that. This also means I lose out on wireless N, but my internet connection is pretty slow anyway.

My impression is that the TrueType guys obsessed about file size. Every table has its own structure, which is more compact than CFF's "one size fits all" approach.

Type1 is the most complex container. I can easily make a T1 font that is valid but unparsable by common parsers. Not sure what Adobe was thinking there.

The web fonts that are getting popular now are basically just TrueType with the tables ordered in a sensible sequence and some compression added (though you can embed a CFF font into a WOFF container, but I've yet to encounter such a font... I don't know how to handle subroutines when a CFF font is embedded in a TrueType container, so I'm a bit interested in getting my hand on such a font so that I can add support for it in my renderer.)

It's a very simple format. Just define a couple of structs, and implement a few commands, and it spits out the relevant font data in a nice "dictionary" like struct. Compare that with Type 1, where you need to write either a fuzzy parser or (what I did) a post script interpreter. TrueType is even worse, needing numerous parsers as each table is in its own unique format.

So no metacompiling, but a pleasant surprise after having struggled through the other two and done in a tenth of the time. The only stumbling block for parsing CFF is encryption (the charstrings are encrypted in a lame attempt to stop people from writing their own renderers), but the documentation now contains all the info you need to handle that.

The problem with bitmapped fonts were never that they look bad, but they are difficult to scale to different font sizes. Say, if you got a bitmapped font with the sizes for 8pt and 12pt embedded, but you need them at 9.5pt, then you're stuck with using a image scaling algorithm.

TrueType/CFF are based on vectors, and saying that we don't need vector based fonts is a bit like saying that we don't need SVG since we got PNG.

Shouldn't be. Hinting is really just a hack to make fonts look good when you only have a handful of pixels to draw with.

However asian true type fonts often abuse the hinting engine. I.e if you render them unhinted they don't render fully (True type hints are Turing complete programs, with all the ills that bring).

TrueType was introduces in 1991, or perhaps even earlier. TrueType is based on Apple's SFNT fonts, which is older and type1 is older still.

So shouldn't all patents have run out by now?

In cff files there are commands that that describes the elements of a glyph. This is used to determine what is important when rendering fonts at small sizes. For instance you don't want the hole in the "A" character to disappear at smaller sizes.

True type files have small programs that you execute when rendering at small sizes that moves the points that makes up the glyph. CFF and Type1 has commands like "stemv" that describes a vertical stem, and then it's up to the renderer to best figure out what to do.

Type3 fonts have no hinting, and is often thought of as ugly for that reason, but with sufficient DPI they are just as good looking as any other type of font. They are a bit more annoying to render than Type 1 fonts, as they can contain color and even pattern fills, but AFAIK is not used much. My renderer can handle them too, except if they contain transparencies (AFAIK none do).

The big headache with rendering CFF is the hinting. I just ignored the hints, which gave okay result with 12+ font sizes. But without proper hinting small font sizes quickly become unclear.

CFF is very similar to Type1 fonts, so presumably this will also result in better looking Type1 fonts. Basically CFF is a compact way of storing Type1 fonts. I particularly liked how the CFF container format works. It almost parses itself, type1 fonts take more effort to parse, and true type fonts take a lot more effort to parse (but non-hinted true type rendering is OTOH super easy.)

The iPhone represents everything that's wrong with America
-- Oscar Wilde

What, when did he say that?