You're just matching them wrong. On/off and yes/no may look unequal, but what about yes/off or on/no?
[1]: https://www.boggsfiles.com/x-files-scripts-by-season/season-... [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQbfRmeq3FsajjYcEuqDHv0kf2B...
The movie she mentioned in the anecdote was I Want To Believe. Here is the actual scanned screenplay, rather than re-typed:
https://lvei.net/wp-content/uploads/script-de-prod/The-X-Fil...
Just scroll through and look. In almost every paragraph or dialogue block, the last line ends very close to the right margin. Pretty much the only places that doesn't happen is when there's a single short line of dialogue by itself, meaning it doesn't wrap to a second line.
Looking through scripts on Boggsfiles, it's much more inconsistent, but it does happen, and perhaps more frequently in the later seasons. Here's one, from season 9; take a look at page 10 (page 13 in the PDF) for example, but it really happens throughout.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dlnc2prPVgPLN4CQSiMQMvD2VSl...
Maybe this was not the rule, but something that he had always strived for, so he felt the need to call it out as something cool?
“And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.
“So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.
I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.
I'm curious to see what the hard-copy scripts actually looked like. The soft copies I've seen aren't particularly idiosyncratic but maybe they've been normied: https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the-x-files_production.h...
This is an acceptable use of the term "widow". From the Oxford English Dictionary [0]:
> A short line of text (usually one consisting of one word or part of a word) which falls undesirably at the end of a paragraph, esp. one set at the top of a page or column.
But there are dozens of contradictory meanings for "widow" and "orphan" [1], so the definition that you gave isn't wrong either.
[0]: https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1579263894
[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-1/tb133chernoff-widows.pdf#subs... (Disclaimer: I'm the author of this article)
"Widows" (alone at the top) and "orphans" (alone at the bottom) are single lines cut off from the rest of a paragraph by a column/page break. The solution is generally just to fiddle with column/page breaks, which is purely typographical.
I'm sure that there's a distinct identity to X-Files dialog; it's just not due to this quirk.
I can totally see a fellow typography geek bragging about this to someone and them being horrified haha.
ETA: I speculate that Carter was avoiding "widows" to be considerate to the actors by not splitting lines across page turns.
I wonder if I was ever taught to write this way and forgot, but I feel like I just learned the terms for the first time.
So I can’t super accept that these are geniuses - it was cheap TV.
In hindsight sure, whole cult following etc. but doesn’t mean it is well designed or even thought out.
A number of show of that era were filmed wide (16:9) and post processed / coloured / reframed and broadcast on TV in a box 4:3 aspect ratio
No visible boom mic operators, etc - careful eyes in the initial post production for TV phase saw to that.
Later wide screen releases were rushed with no real post production budget to address these and other issues - that's on the studios wanting a second grab at money, not the original creative teams.
Similar complaints abound for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and (IIRC) The Wire (?) and their wide screen releases.
Also, the font used for the monospace examples in the post is a great kick to the nostalgia. Which one is it? It reminds me of https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...
[1] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...
Apparently, I googled, “expended ordnance” is the term.
I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.
“It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.”
As a rather, well... "creative" speller I blame Webster for locking things down and ruining it for the rest of us.
It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").
Sorry? How do you think people pronounce words such as truffle / turtle / tremble / pickle / maple / rubble / etc. etc. etc.?
This might potentially
rejuvenate the writing
by disrupting habitual
patterns, which forces
more original choices.The autumn wind moves slow across the field,
and every falling leaf now yields its fight.
The summer gold at last has ceased to yield,
and short days now give way to longer night.
I walk alone beside a calm and quiet stream,
and watch it slowly carry every fallen leaf.
I think of you as some half-forgotten dream,
and taste again that same old, bitter grief.
The silent stars come out to watch it still,
and pale moonlight falls gently on the hill.
A lonesome owl calls out from past the mill,
and time moves on, unhurried and calm, until
the dawn returns to paint the sky brand new,
and I still recall the love I lost with you.
You are right that this is hard from a prompt alone, but for a slightly stranger
reason than the obvious one. The model never sees columns. It sees tokens, and a
token can be one character or nine, so "make this line 80 wide" asks it to run a
hidden tally over pieces it cannot count by looking at them. Any slip early in a
line compounds, and there is no backspace key to reach for once it is committed.
That said, the failure is not total. A model can lean on a learned feel for line
length, pick shorter or longer synonyms to land close to the target, and rewrite
a sentence when it overshoots. It will not be perfect every time, but it lands a
lot more often than pure chance would suggest. The sampling trick you mention is
the real fix: mask each token that would push a line past the limit, and force a
newline the moment the count hits the mark. That converts a fuzzy instruction to
a hard constraint with zero training. Fine tuning helps too, but mostly sharpens
the same internal counter rather than replacing it. This reply is a small proof;
if any line here is off by one, feel free to consider your point demonstrated...> BoVeX gives us a controlled tradeoff between these two states. By changing how much it costs for the text to be semantically wrong, we have a dial that allows us to smoothly interpolate between Lorem Epsom and Donald Knuth.
I did, and then I got a customer email about how they were using a display-zoom OS accessibility feature and things were truncated on their device. :')
See also: localizing your interface to German
Just build your layout so it can squash/stretch appropriately.
> This presents a problem for the typical way that academic papers are written, which is to do all the work in a coffee-fueled fugue in the last few days before the deadline, then stay up all night writing the paper and finding citations for the pro-forma “related work” section which you did last but you know that the reviewers will insist upon
I have zero exposure to academia but chuckled because thats often what I do for blog posts :P
Typesetters are known to be very specific about small details. E. g. tables are typeset with meticulous alignment rules. It may look superfluous, but it is not. The nature of the craft is that it has to be invisible unless you know where to look.
After reading this article I thought "wow that's really impressive and I hate it".
For the same reasons you mention, and the words seem to "blend together" into a blob of text and losing my interest.
Still super impressive that people do this though.
* Widow: a short final line of a paragraph that gets stranded at the top of the next page or column.
* Orphan: a first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of a page or column.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge
Edit: Also, LaTeX has specific penalties for those two: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/32116
That was done by typing the whole paper twice, with added spaces the second time.
It’s not too hard if you try, once you get in the groove :-)
I didn't do it entirely by hand, but I didn't just one-shot it with AI either (good luck). Instead, I wrote the whole dialogue in a special format specifying alternate words [like|similar to] [this|what I'm [currently doing here|doing right now]]. For each length-200 block, the number of variations grows exponentially in the number of "options" to thus choose from, so it becomes feasible to have a computer systematically choose options so as to hide the desired secrets.
The same method could be used for monospace alignment, though I suspect it would be harder the narrower the page be.
dumb is
what I
think
this
end
is
!
If somebody can find it, share it here, I’m going to post it on my own website so it is saved for history. The last time I saw it was 5 or 10 years ago, and there was only one or two copies on the internet at that time, and now there seems to be none.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse%27s_Tale
I know the feeling - a lot of what I remember from the internet 20 years ago simply doesn't exist, and is unfindable on any search engine.
https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/de/Morgenstern%2C_Christia...
It's shockingly impressive.
I usually only did that when the text already was close to lining up that way, though.
I know I couldn't today.
(source: https://github.com/allanlw/seeborg)
Manual: https://www.atarimania.com/st/files/protext_5_04_arnor.pdf
Screenshot of manual section: https://jumpshare.com/share/jOnMu7M36AOEWyoL0QDl
Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.
And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.
So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.
One of my favorite quotes is from Penn and Teller, "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect". AI has shifted that a bit.
But lots of technology has rendered formerly human-lead things obsolete, and I'm sure we'll find new ways to express creativity.
Video game text FAQs in general though were a dying genre before gen AI anyhow. Something I bemoan when I try to find one little piece of info and I'm faced with guides that are spread out on dozens of webpages for impressions of ads that I don't even see, or long videos that I have try to scroll through and take a ton of time just to find out if the person even went to the area I'm interested in. I sure miss Ctrl+F on GameFAQs.
Strangely enough, this same book doesn't have the same problem on other platforms.
The story talks about monospace fonts and how unappealing they could be for reading prose. It is a fascinating post on itself, but here's what happened - it caught my eye while I was busy, I clicked the link, it opened the page, I kept it hanging around and forgot about it. Then HN page got buried in my browser history. After a while, I found the tab, I read the story and it made me thinking if anyone shared any thoughts on HN. Instead of digging it up from browser history - I ran consult-hn and found the thread - it showed up in an org-mode-derived buffer of hn-reader.el. I was reading through the comments, and I was like: "yah, this probably would be easier and faster to read if I used a different font". I enabled variable-pitch-mode, but it didn't get much better - the default font I set for the face isn't great - I just needed something that existed in both Linux and Mac. I should've picked a better one.
"Let me try a different font", I thought. And how do you change the font family in Emacs? There's probably a way doing it through the UI, but thank you, no thank you - I have a programmable editor. I instinctively opened a scratch buffer and started typing: (set-face-attribute ... And at that point I realized: "Well, this would, a) Change the font everywhere b) What the heck were the parameters for this sucker?".
Of course, why not ask the LLM? I started typing the prompt, right in that buffer. I could've just finish typing and call (gptel-send). But, "what if this becomes a longer chat?". I mean, I still could continue chatting in that buffer, but there are benefits for having specialized gptel buffer, for instance, all my gptel-dedicated buffers get automatically saved. So, instead, I invoked (gptel-inline) - if the answer is short - I'd dismiss the popup and if I have follow-ups, I'll just continue.
LLM told me how to change the font in the current buffer. But I said: "I want to change it for any chosen buffer, since I'd be invoking this from the scratch buffer". At this point I was thinking: "I'm just fooling around, but let's see where it takes me..." It gave me this code snippet.
(with-current-buffer "target-buffer-name"
(setq buffer-face-mode-face '(:family "Georgia" :height 140))
(buffer-face-mode 1))
And at that point, I felt so stupid for wasting my time, I typed: "Can you just build me a consult picker, to select a font for a given buffer with a live preview."
And it just did. ~25 LOC. It took me far longer to write about it, in reality, the transition from a fleeting thought, from a mere idea to a concrete implementation took me seconds. Seconds!
And now I have a command that I can either keep in my scratch buffer, or stick into my config. Or literally just discard until next time I need to temporarily change the font in a given buffer.
Note: this is not a post about "how awesome it is to use AI in Emacs", no. It is all about how enormously flexible Emacs is to bend around to deal with any kind of text.