[Edu-sig] IDLE fonts

[kirby urner]

>
> OK, so here it is Monday, and my font of choice for future classes,
> for projecting especially, is Akbar font, patterned after the
> handwriting of Matt Goening.

Um, Groening.

Plus I wanted to extol one of the virtues, which is Akbar isn't
messing up my Chinese characters either, here's a link to a screen
fragment (we tend to do stuff with I Ching around animation, in Tk or
whatever, good intro to permutations and binary, what got Leibniz
going in some ways (a student thereof)).

Link:  http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/iching_in_akbar.png

I'd welcome more input on what fonts are good outside of Latin-1,
especially within IDLE though we also plan on continuing to use
Wing-101 on edubuntu in some classrooms.

Re using Akbar font (non-exclusively of course), I think a lot of the
same theories are behind the O'Reilly Head First series, but with
allusions in Knuth, where he draws those perfect squares, then makes
them a little irregular and tilted, somehow looks better, more savvy,
more sophisticated... (volume 3 right?).  As we say around here (zip
code 97214) "Keep Portland Weird" (Austin TX has a similar zip code).

In brief you want fonts and features with a "human touch" (looks more
like handwriting) as a purely "machine look" (everything "done in the
factory") removes that hand-crafted aspect of intelligence, seems more
like some "AI hell" wherein computers rule (i.e. the humans got too
stupid to hold up their side in the equations, like those Eloi in
Wall*E).  Psychologically, it helps to have "that human touch" -- even
if it's all still just bits and bytes at the end of the day.

Kirby

PS:  note the friendly fonts used with these eToys units, Ubuntu in
general good at font friendliness (part of the look and feel).
http://www.kusasa.org/content/etoys/etoys.html

More reading:
http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2007/11/unicode.html (unicode hype)
http://www.slate.com/id/2192535/pagenum/all/ (good on allure of fonts)
http://obfuscators.org/2008/04/obfuscation-weird-languages-and-code.html
(more on aesthetics)