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Post by Cavorite on Nov 30, 2007 0:19:05 GMT -4
I have a somewhat tangential question regarding the issues about resurrecting or reusing old tech. I read a while ago about how communicating with the Voyager probes is still done using the original bank of 70s era computers at Tidbinbilla. www.smh.com.au/news/science/thirty-years-tracking-faint-whispers-from-space/2007/08/31/1188067368154.htmlFrom the above article: "The Voyager technology is so outmoded," said Tidbinbilla's spokesman, Glen Nagle, "we have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them."
That is because the ageing probes can only chat at a sluggish 32 bits a second, far too slow for modern computers."That just don't sound right. In the case of the missing Apollo tapes, it it is easy to understand why they would need one of the old machines to read them. But I would have thought that something like the transmissions from Voyager could just have been handed to an emulation running on more modern hardware. Obviously not, but why not? Is it just for economic reasons, it being cheaper to just keep running on the old tech instead of having to write the emulator? Is there some system architecture reason?
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reynoldbot
Jupiter
A paper-white mask of evil.
Posts: 790
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Post by reynoldbot on Nov 30, 2007 1:25:05 GMT -4
The beveled edges can help, but the fact that English writing travels from left to right means I will always be pushing the nib instead of pulling it when I write. As Jay pointed out, certain letters are difficult even with specialized nib shapes. Also, fancy calligraphy nibs are great for elegant logos and letterheads, but traditional comic lettering is simple and easy to read.
The ink they usually put in those resevoirs is shady at best and usually not waterproof. The last time I used a resevoir the ink bled crazy blue everywhere when I put watercolor over the top of it.
When I have the time, I sometimes go in with a thin pen after I do all my brushwork and clean and perfect some of the lines. Fortunately as my inking gets better I have to do that less and less. I've inspected original pages by veteran professional cartoonists and I've seen that they do it too.
Jay you guessed it right. I usually do use the pointed nibs and that creates the problem. Bent tip nibs are a good idea but the problem is that they generally draw thin and thick lines and when it comes to lettering, I need a consistent line weight.
I've actually considered learning to write with my right hand just so I can have an easier time lettering.
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Post by JayUtah on Nov 30, 2007 2:10:33 GMT -4
A clean-up pass is appropriate to any production artwork. It's how the professionals achieve professional results. It's part of the progressive-refinement approach to production art. I shared one end of a Herman Miller studio for six months with Bill Stumpf, who would start out a rendering with hacking swipes of a 3-inch marker or watercolor brush. I'd look over four hours later to see him putting in details with a brush about the size of a cat whisker. The broad, random slashes were still there, but fit well what the finished drawing ended up being. The pads on bent-tip tips come in a variety of shapes. I can look up the precise part numbers on my sets. There are some with perfectly circular pads that are meant to give a consistent line weight no matter the direction of the stroke, but they aren't always as consistent as advertised. They're usually slightly cupped in order to compensate for variation in the angle at which you hold it; otherwise the edge of the pad would dig the paper. The ink is supposed to conform to the pad outline by capillary action, but as you can expect that varies greatly with the viscosity of the ink. You might have to bite the bullet and hire a right-handed lettering assistant -- some high-school art student or something. I guess it depends on how well you can bend your non-dominant hand to your will. Or you could always letter in Hebrew.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Nov 30, 2007 11:44:14 GMT -4
Go DaVinci style - write everything backwards.
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Post by JayUtah on Nov 30, 2007 11:52:14 GMT -4
Of course -- every reader of comics can read backwards handwritten 15th century Florentine script. How silly we've been.
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Nov 30, 2007 14:32:00 GMT -4
I'm sure some old computer printers used to write lines of text forwards and backwards as the printhead scanned across the paper: it was something of a waste to move the head without printing anything. As all it had to do was print out lines of symbols in a particular arrangement, it didn't matter which end of a line it started from. I'm sure it will take longer at first, but is it such a stretch to think of lettering as transcribing a series of shapes rather than "writing"?
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Post by Data Cable on Nov 30, 2007 15:17:04 GMT -4
is it such a stretch to think of lettering as transcribing a series of shapes rather than "writing"? Not really, but unless we also adopt bidirectional reading (as, I believe, the written Narn language was intended, perhaps as a retcon) , it requires quite a bit of forethought as to where a "backward-written" line will end when one begins to write it. Computers can do this quickly, but it would take a bit of training for us Hyoo-mons, especially if the content is being composed on the fly.
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Post by JayUtah on Nov 30, 2007 15:38:54 GMT -4
It's not a mental stretch to think of letters merely as abstract shapes. Less so, in fact, for artists, who do it habitually with lots of forms. The problem is more that the shapes of letters in Roman script evolved according to the ease with which they could be written by predominantly right-handed people using quills.
Modern ballpoints (and even my Mont Blanc fountain pen) are entirely tolerant of pushing the pen instead of dragging it. Not so with the quills used by artists (and earlier writers). If you hold the pen naturally and drag it toward you, you get the expected results. If you slide the pen sideways, the pen will likely blot: open up the space between the nib tips and allow all the ink in the nib to fall at that point on the paper. Experienced pen-handlers learn to overcome that. If you push the pen away from you, the nib digs into the paper; or else it catches the paper, springs back to its detent, and flings droplets of ink all over your work. This is especially true of the thin steel nibs used in art.
Roman capitals favor dragging the pen left to right, in the manner of a right-handed scribe holding the pen naturally. Keep in mind that some letters are formed by two or more dragged strokes, such as capital C.
If you're patient, any shape can be drawn with any pen by any hand. The problem is not that it's impossible: simply that Roman lettering favors the right-handed because it was evolved largely by right-handed scribes.
There is a sort of disconnection here, though. The erect (or slightly slanted) disconnected Roman capitals that are the norm for comic lettering are not generally the letters intended to be written by quills. The slant, in fact, was intended to accommodate quill writing over the normal erect capitals, which were used mostly in engraving. The styles most adapted to the quill are those scripted styles we see in classical calligraphy. The stiff quills with the blunt points evolved the thick letters we see in medieval illuminated manuscripts, painstakingly executed at a glacial pace. The thinner, springier quills (and later steel pens) sharpened to a needle point gave us the undulating thick-and-thin style reminiscient of French script, and the body script in, say, the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution manuscripts. Those scripts persisted because it was the natural rendition from the types of pens in common use.
Neither of those scripts is really appropriate for comic letteriing. The modern Roman block letters are more adaptable to pencil, chalk, and charcoal.
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Post by JayUtah on Nov 30, 2007 15:49:53 GMT -4
I have no problem reading Roman text forward. I have little problem reading my native language written backwards in Roman text. And I have no problem reading Hebrew in the Aramaic alphabet from right to left -- it doesn't seem weird or unnatural to me. There is something to be said for the natural direction of writing.
Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, had no natural direction. It could be written horizontally, vertically, left-to-right, right-to-left, up, or down. The key is that the little animals in the inscription always face the beginning. So look where the little snake is facing, and that tells you where to start reading. The Egyptians even adopted the "plowman" approach to textual writing in hieratic and demotic forms of the script: they would write a line in one direction, then upon arriving at the side of the page would simply drop down a line and begin writing back toward the other direction and so forth to the end of the page.
Leonardo da Vinci obviously had impeccable penmanship. And he was clearly able to abstract the forms of letters such as to read them both forwards and backwards. I tend to believe that he wrote as he did simply because it was easier, for the same reason that the prevalent scripts favor right-handed scribes. His pen simply worked better for writing when he reversed the orientation of the letters. He was able to write faster and easier.
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Post by JayUtah on Nov 30, 2007 16:11:45 GMT -4
But I would have thought that something like the transmissions from Voyager could just have been handed to an emulation running on more modern hardware.
It's often a qualitative difference in budgeting and funding. You can always get money to maintain an ongoing project, but it's more difficult to get funding to update the technology associated with an old project. Government funding is just weird that way. In one lab where I worked we had an old HP minicomputer whose only job was to drive our custom-built film printer. The drivers had been written for that machine, and ran only under that operating system on that machine. It was deemed cheaper in the long run simply to continue repairing and maintaining that setup rather than undertake the expense to build a modern system.
Often there are technical reasons. Migrating from one technology to another always entails the risk that you won't have accounted in the new system for every property displayed in the old system. Many of these systems are surprisingly complex. "Don't fix it if it ain't broke," is a much harder maxim in large, mixed-technology systems than in most software-only systems today. Sometimes the expected operation of a system includes side-effect or defective behavior, such as charge-discharge rates, latencies, resistances, or harmonics.
It's anathema to us today, but in times past it was acceptable engineering to write a software loop that took exactly a certain number of cycles to execute so as to mesh perfectly with some other cycle. That sort of poor-man's multiprocessing won't fly today, but it was okay if done correctly, with a proper knowledge of the target machine's execution characteristics. Remember that "portable code" wasn't really in fashion in the 1960s and 1970s. You wrote code for exactly one application, with full knowledge of the environment it was intended to work in. Since those environment requirements were "locked down," a good engineer was expected to capitalize on the advantages such a lock-down would give him.
Modern constructs such as pre-emptive multitasking, storage isolation, and mutual exclusion formalisms give us flexibility in writing similar programs for a variety of architectures. But that flexibility was not a constraint to those engineers. So they didn't waste effort pursuing it. It's vitally important to realize that past engineers did it right. We've just evolved a different concept these days of "right."
So it's usually an architectural issue that was a defensible decision at the time, and creates an economic situation where repair and maintenance is still usually the cheapest route.
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reynoldbot
Jupiter
A paper-white mask of evil.
Posts: 790
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Post by reynoldbot on Nov 30, 2007 18:42:52 GMT -4
A clean-up pass is appropriate to any production artwork. It's how the professionals achieve professional results. It's part of the progressive-refinement approach to production art. I shared one end of a Herman Miller studio for six months with Bill Stumpf, who would start out a rendering with hacking swipes of a 3-inch marker or watercolor brush. I'd look over four hours later to see him putting in details with a brush about the size of a cat whisker. The broad, random slashes were still there, but fit well what the finished drawing ended up being. The pads on bent-tip tips come in a variety of shapes. I can look up the precise part numbers on my sets. There are some with perfectly circular pads that are meant to give a consistent line weight no matter the direction of the stroke, but they aren't always as consistent as advertised. They're usually slightly cupped in order to compensate for variation in the angle at which you hold it; otherwise the edge of the pad would dig the paper. The ink is supposed to conform to the pad outline by capillary action, but as you can expect that varies greatly with the viscosity of the ink. You might have to bite the bullet and hire a right-handed lettering assistant -- some high-school art student or something. I guess it depends on how well you can bend your non-dominant hand to your will. Or you could always letter in Hebrew. I'll look at some of those nibs, but I won't get my hopes too high. As for an assistant, being that I'm not even out of college yet it's probably a little early to be thinking about that. I don't even have a career to speak of yet. I may learn to write with my right hand, or I may just continue using crappy felt pens (it looks bad to me, but the average reader may not notice). I do have one other option. I could create my own hand-lettered font in photoshop. Basically I would just carefully draw each letter a few times, upper case and lower case and bold and italic and extras for variety, and scan each in and download a program that wold convert them into a font. I would use keyboard shortcuts to enable boldface or invite letter variations to keep it looking hand-made. It's a pain but probably the best option I have.
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reynoldbot
Jupiter
A paper-white mask of evil.
Posts: 790
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Post by reynoldbot on Nov 30, 2007 18:46:06 GMT -4
I'm sure some old computer printers used to write lines of text forwards and backwards as the printhead scanned across the paper: it was something of a waste to move the head without printing anything. As all it had to do was print out lines of symbols in a particular arrangement, it didn't matter which end of a line it started from. I'm sure it will take longer at first, but is it such a stretch to think of lettering as transcribing a series of shapes rather than "writing"? I did an internship recently where I was asked to reletter a bunch of old comics. I worked very slowly and I used felt pens. I bought over a dozen of them and used a new one for every page to make sure the lettering was consistent. And my intern advisor told me exactly what you just mentioned: think of the words as a series of shapes rather than letters. It vastly improved the quality of my lettering, as it made it much easier for me to slow down and put the words together deliberately.
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Post by JayUtah on Nov 30, 2007 18:52:27 GMT -4
A nib with a bulbous tip might work. The bulb resists digging when pushed. You would just have to learn how much pressure prevents flicking. I don't know if Speedball makes the ones I'm thinking of. All I see is a cute little nib in my nib drawer.
Scott Adams used computer lettering for a while on Dilbert but eventually went back to hand-lettering. (Not that anyone ever accused him of being able to draw!)
I resisted for years moving to felt-tips. I thought they were cheap, inelegant, and that the ink was unacceptable. But maybe in my old age I just don't care as much. After reproduction, toner is toner regardless of how much you spent on the ink that told the toner to be there.
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reynoldbot
Jupiter
A paper-white mask of evil.
Posts: 790
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Post by reynoldbot on Nov 30, 2007 18:53:30 GMT -4
Neither of those scripts is really appropriate for comic letteriing. The modern Roman block letters are more adaptable to pencil, chalk, and charcoal. Once again you hit the nail on the head. While I do not have to conform to the strict industry standards of comic lettering that the big mainstream companies dictate, I still am obligated to make my lettering as clear and concise as possible. I sometimes use cursive in comics where the story is more visual and the words less integral to the plot, but even that can be too ornate and hard to read. Some of the better artists have lettering that is as individual and personal as every other part of their artwork. I know right away Bill Watterson lettering when I see it. It's still early in the game for me, and I have lots of learning to do yet. I believe I can overcome my lettering challenge, I just have to work a little harder than most of you righties :-)
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reynoldbot
Jupiter
A paper-white mask of evil.
Posts: 790
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Post by reynoldbot on Nov 30, 2007 19:06:09 GMT -4
A nib with a bulbous tip might work. The bulb resists digging when pushed. You would just have to learn how much pressure prevents flicking. I don't know if Speedball makes the ones I'm thinking of. All I see is a cute little nib in my nib drawer. Scott Adams used computer lettering for a while on Dilbert but eventually went back to hand-lettering. (Not that anyone ever accused him of being able to draw!) I resisted for years moving to felt-tips. I thought they were cheap, inelegant, and that the ink was unacceptable. But maybe in my old age I just don't care as much. After reproduction, toner is toner regardless of how much you spent on the ink that told the toner to be there. Yet another good tip I will follow up on. Scott Adams has chronic hand and wrist problems, and he has spent years trying to find the best balance of quality vs. comfort. I thought the digital lettering he did looked awful (as it always does), but I don't knock him for it. Scott Adams may not be a virtuoso, but he is very consistent and creates very clear images that are instantly recognizable. I think he is a fine artist. I also feel the same way about Gary Larson. His color work is phenomenal. Subtle color shifts, light and shadow, and a wide variety of textures permeated his watercolor and color pencil work. You have a point about reproduction. Higgens ink is patchy but it reproduces fine, so I don't mind using it. Felt tip ink is always awful, and I never use it if I know any wet medium is going anywhere near it. Over the years, felt tip pen ink turns all sorts of wacky colors and even starts to smell bad. The Graphic Artists Guild has certain recommendations for comic artists when it comes to the preservation of comic work. Since comics are increasingly being viewed as a serious art form, galleries and archives of original work are becoming more popular. They recommend using inks and paper that won't become discolored with age and they even recommend not erasing pencils. This becomes a real pain when I go to scan artwork because I have to spend the next hour or so getting rid of them (they show up even when I threshold the image). I could always switch to non-photo blue pencils but I hate using them (I can never see what I'm doing when I draw with them).
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