The Unicode Consortium, in its ∞ wisdom, decided a long time ago that the Fraktur script—that weird old-fashioned German style of text—should not be encoded in its own block, but rather considered a font in which standard latin text can be rendered. That has some implications for ligatures, but that’s beyond the scope of this post and my knowledge.
However, most of the Fraktur alphabet is available deep in the math characters code points. Using a simple conversion tool, like this text converter I keep bookmarked, you can replace standard characters with those math symbols that resemble them. By doing that, you can copy and paste what looks like formatted text into plain text boxes, and—for example—make jokes with it on Twitter.
Which raises the question of how various platforms support it, and how that support degrades. After all, we’re talking about pretty deep recesses of the Unicode character space, so it can vary pretty wildly.
Earlier tonight I made a joke on Twitter to my friend Noah that used these characters. Here’s how it appeared on my OS X box running Firefox:
But here’s how it looked to him on his iPhone:
I wanted to see how it appears on different platforms, so I asked people to send me screenshots, and got a whole bunch of responses. On multiple versions of Windows and different platforms, you get empty boxes:
While on Android, across many different apps, it degrades to the plain latin text!
I also got evidence that it worked fine on a range of GNU/Linux boxes, every OS X combination I saw, and a Chromebook.
The frustrating result is that not only can you not count on all popular platforms to support these characters, you also can’t count on them to fail the same way. Android removes the context that these are “special” characters, while iOS, Windows, (and, incidentally, Sailfish OS) render it completely unreadable.
So I guess don’t use it for mission-critical Twitter jokes.
P.S. If you’ve read this far about Fraktur, you really ought to read about the Antiqua-Fraktur dispute, which is an amazing piece of typographic history.
It probably goes without saying that I am a strong supporter of Techdirt’s call for Elon Musk to release space photos taken by SpaceX into the public domain. It would continue a tradition of unrestricted space photos that began with NASA’s images—necessarily public domain, coming from a U.S. government agency—but which is jeopardized when space photographs come from private companies.
This is an issue I’ve been vocal about before, and with other contract photographers that NASA uses. (Like for example: it strikes me as just impossibly sad that none of the photos of the retiring shuttle being flown over the US—take this beautiful shot over D.C., to pick just one—likely won’t be in the public domain for another century.)
And just generally, it’s an incredibly valuable thing that U.S. government works go straight to the public domain. Lots of other countries don’t have that, despite the common-sense logic behind it: we, the taxpayers, already paid for the work, which requires no additional incentive to be produced. To see that value get chipped away by private deals would be tragic.
All this is to say, society has gotten so much out of media from space being free for all to share, and that shouldn’t end as private companies get access. Please, Elon Musk, commit to releasing photography from SpaceX into the public domain. The future will thank you.
The 1903 Supreme Court ruling in Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co. was a hugely influential for turn-of-the-century copyright. Bleistein was an employee of a company that had designed circus posters for The Great Wallace Shows. Donaldson was a competitor of that company, and agreed to print a subsequent run of those same posters without authorization.
At issue was whether these posters—which were certainly creative, but just as certainly commercial—could be restricted by copyright. By ruling in favor of the plaintiff, the Supreme Court made it clear that the bar for copyright eligibility is not some abstract notion of artistic merit, but simple originality. Commercial speech was just as qualified as fine art. From Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr’s majority opinion:
It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations, outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits. At the one extreme, some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. Their very novelty would make them repulsive until the public had learned the new language in which their author spoke. It may be more than doubted, for instance, whether the etchings of Goya or the paintings of Manet would have been sure of protection when seen for the first time. At the other end, copyright would be denied to pictures which appealed to a public less educated than the judge. Yet if they command the interest of any public, they have a commercial value — it would be bold to say that they have not an aesthetic and educational value — and the taste of any public is not to be treated with contempt. It is an ultimate fact for the moment, whatever may be our hopes for a change. That these pictures had their worth and their success is sufficiently shown by the desire to reproduce them without regard to the plaintiffs’ rights.
I’d read about this case many times, but had never seen high quality copies of the three posters at the heart of the matter. After a bit of digging, I found copies in the Library of Congress, which have been scanned at an extremely high resolution. I’ve cropped, cleaned up, and color-corrected the images in this post, but if you’ve got any interest I strongly recommend downloading the huge TIFF files from the LoC. Descriptions of each image by Holmes himself:
Nowadays it seems obvious that these creative and original images would be subject to copyright. It’s a nice reminder that the assumptions of today are likely just as brittle as the ones that affected these colorful posters over a century ago.
Fortunately, it was easy to whip together a pretty convincing looking chunky white Helvetica list of names. From there, I used a company called Teespring, which lets you pick the printing threshold and retail cost. At first I just made the cut I wanted for myself—white text on a black men’s American Apparel shirt—but a bunch of my friends asked for women’s cuts, and it’s very clear to me in retrospect I should’ve made them in the first place.
Both campaigns “tipped” in the first day online, so men’s and women’s t-shirts will be printed in the next few weeks. So far, 40 shirts have been sold—it’s definitely kind of remarkable to think that sprung from my off-hand idea.
I’ve gotten other shirts from Teespring and the quality is high, so I’m looking forward to wearing it. If you want one of these, get it quick!
For the first time today I noticed that the They Might Be Giants song “Lucky Ball and Chain” off Flood quotes melody and reversed lyrics from a Phil Spector produced Darlene Love song “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry“. Hear the two segments back to back:
I wrote a bit about musical quotes in the context of a lawsuit involving Alicia Keys two years ago. We see it all the time in film (Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson make an art of it) but it still feels uncommon in pop music.
This is an issue I’ve been vocal about before, and with other contract photographers that NASA uses. (Like for example: it strikes me as just impossibly sad that none of the photos of the retiring shuttle being flown over the US—take 
