Can you give some examples what you liked about the book? What's in there, that's not in other books?
I stumbled over the book several times, but always hesitated to buy it.

Ralf

I have noticed a few typos, however: "RoboLab" instead of "RoboFab" on page 442.

What about "Unicode Explained"? Anyone read that one?

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/unicode/

ChrisL

> I was doing some Christmas shopping yesterday and spotted this at the local B&N:

Fonts and Encodings, by Yannis Haralambous.

http://www.typophile.com/node/38641

> http://www.typophile.com/node/38641

I missed that thread, and it didn't show up when I did a Typophile search on the author's name. (Should have used Google--d'oh!)

I missed that thread too, David.

ChrisL

And see this one Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer's Guide to the Encoding Standard

* adds two more books to the xmas wishlist *

Oh, my...

I've noticed one alarmingly serious flaw in the book: Everywhere that code is shown, which is set in monospaced type (Letter Gothic), whenever there is a negative number, only the minus sign is present--no numeral. At first I wasn't sure, but it seems to be consistent throughout the book.

O'Reilly has really messed up. I think they need to pull the copies and issue refunds or something.

(Seems like I saw another book where this happened, but I can't quite remember what it was...)

(Actually, it's not Letter Gothic, but something similar.)

* takes one book off the xmas wishlist *

My copy should arrive tomorrow from Amazon. I assume O'Reilly will send errata sheets or some such thing to make the code right for us.
ChrisL

Seems like it, Mark. My guess is the minus sign triggered some sort of hidden text function that requires some sort of exception tag.

ChrisL

Kind of ironic considering that the book concerns itself partly with describing the advantages of XML and TEX-based typesetting systems, and such a system was used to produce the book.

"Kinda like Jim Fixx dieing of a heart attack?"

Will the old timers please stand and be recognized. That was what, a hundred years ago? I remember the sense of irony well. I guess I thank god for my knees going before my heart.

Thanks Mark for the good and bad news.

I can't say how the French edition is, but the English edition is just riddled with errors. Most are typos and the like, but some of the errors are pretty serious. For example, in the introduction it claims that the standard em square is 1024 x 1024 for PostScript fonts, and 4096 x 4096 for TrueType fonts. Of course, the correct values are 1000 x 1000 and 2048 x 2048 - and that difference between 1000 and 1024 is important, because it means that the TrueType norm is not a simply multiple of the Type 1 ("PostScript") norm.

It's a shame, because it is a wonderfully ambitious book and covers an amazing amount of ground. A second edition that corrected the errors could be a truly great book.

Regards,

T

I wrote to them about the negative number omissions using their online errata form for the book. I also heard back about the lack of an online edition, but no real answer yet, just a note to say the question has been forwarded to the author and publisher. (I thought O'Reilly was the publisher, but I guess it's more complicated than that.)

I can confirm Thomas's comment about the book being "riddled with errors." I'm noticing more little things the more I read it. I can look past the mistakes when I know better, but it makes it hard to trust the information that's new to me.

I guess until a corrected edition is out, it will be a bit like the Wikipedia. Gloriously deep, but suspect.

I knew there was a reason I didn’t put it on my Amazon wish list. That and I would have to actually, you know, design and release fonts to make it useful.

Thanks, Stewf!

ChrisL

It does have a chapter (about 50 pages) called "Fonts and Web Pages" in which he talks about of using fonts on the Web as well as efforts to expand the range of typefaces available for use on the Web, such as TrueDoc, WEFT, GlyphGate, and SVG.