The Idea Factory of Schenectady, NY: Calligraphy for the modern day

The Idea Factory of Schenectady, NY

When asked where he gets his ideas, Harlan Ellison has the following reply:

When some jamook asks me this one (thereby revealing him/herself to be a person who has about as much imaginative muscle as a head of lettuce), I always smile prettily and answer, "Schenectady."

And when the jamook looks at me quizzically, and scratches head with hairy hand, I add: "Oh, sure. There's a swell Idea Service in Schenectady; and every week I send 'em twenty-five bucks; and every week they send me a fresh six-pack of ideas."

I figure if you're going to steal, steal from the best.

Saturday, December 25, 2004

Calligraphy for the modern day

Medieval calligraphy often features different colours of ink used as accents, for a variety of reasons too numerous to get into here. We don't often see this technique used in print today, though one obvious inheritor is the red lettering in certain Bibles to highlight Jesus' words.

One place that accent colours are often used, though, is syntax highlighting. Text editors such as jEdit and even emacs use different colours to make code easier to read on the screen. So, what about taking a short piece of code -- say, a LISP implementation of the Sieve of Eratosthenes, or a Python version of Dijkstra's algorithm -- and rendering it on parchment in all its syntax-highlighted glory?