A side note - Re: State of Text Rendering 2024

[Hin-Tak Leung]

I read through Behdad's essay, and also watched and enjoyed the whole of Werner's 8 minutes' video playing the harpsichord with his daughter. First time I did - a while ago, I tried to look up Werner's concert schedule as a musician, and came upon some Youtube videos of Werner conducting an orchestra with a violinist lady of the same surname. Meant to sit and watch them, then forgot. :-). (mystery solved too, who that lady of the same surname is).

Don't know whether it is appropriate to reference it in my response to Behdad's, hence - my first few seconds of impression listening to Werner's playing, was - Werner is a "pianist" (as opposite to a "harpsichordist"). There is a bunch of people in my local university's music deparment who specializes in "historically informed" performances, and they do talk about differences in keyboard technique of harpsichord vs piano. They have a 200-year-old piano (i.e. one would have been available around Chopin's time), a bit smaller and with fewer keys than (not missing keys, just antique pianos, before modern industrial manufacturing and standardization, have shorter keyboards and a narrower range), a wooden-frame instead of a steel frame for the strings inside the modern ones, in one of their back rooms. It is still being somewhat regularly used.

So it is a "draw to attention"/preference(?) based on familarity - for some people, a pianist on a harpsichord, sounds different than a person who specializes in playing the harpsichord, plays the harpsichord. Some don't mind the difference, noticing the difference, but enjoying both. Some have a clear preference, one way or another.

For some people, they notice the difference between FreeType and MS/Apple's font scaler, and also that they like and much prefer the latter. There is nothing wrong with FreeType itself, and I suspect it is just preference based on familiarity, but "familarity" is a powerful human emotion. In that reality, nothing is good enough as a replacement to the genuine thing.

One item on my TODO list - like to see Werner face to face one day. 27 or 28 years and still counting. First wrote in 1996/1997? I was doing a post-doc on superconducting materials at the time, after having just finished a PhD thesis in LaTeX (...*not* on the subject of LaTeX...). LaTeX was the norm in physics and especially theorectical physics, so I thought I might as well use it for personal CJK things.

(Another person I like to meet eventually in a simlar sense, is Phil Hazel - of exim, but not because of exim. He should be within cycling/walking distances, and apparently we even have very tangentially overlapping socal circles - and still haven't).