We’ve written a number of essays. Many of them are designed to explain things that took quite a while to learn, and we like to refer back to them periodically. Not all of them are as fresh as we’d like, and some cover bits of trivia that are no longer useful at all. But even the stale articles still hold some historical interest, and we present them all here.
- Magical Macintosh Key Sequences is a list of little-known command and function keys in both Mac OS 9 and X.
- Essays on Printing, mostly in the Classic (i.e. pre Mac-OS X) days, explaining some of the hairier things printer drivers and applications had to deal with.
- Application Compatibility in printer drivers was a complete nightmare in classic Mac OS printer drivers. Since printer drivers were not very well documented, applications tended to implement things via trial and error, which meant that when you were writing a new driver, you would have to be somewhat bug-compatible with earlier printer drivers.
- Non-Linear Text Scaling was an issue you had to consider when printing, since 48 point text would not take up four times the space of 12 point text. I was often surprised that applications and printer drivers got this right as often as they did.
- A description of Text (and bitmap) Smoothing in the LaserWriter, and what “Precision Bitmap Alignment” meant in the LaserWriter driver, and why you probably don’t want to try and replicate this behavior precisely.
- About The Web
- Why avoiding tables (for layout) is important is an essay written in 2002. It still generates a fair amount of interest.