Yesterday I was browsing a PDF issue of the German magazine “Stern” on the train and I noticed a lot of peculiar, prominent typos:

“Tecāik” instead of “Technik”, “Soā” instead of “Sohn”, etc. Is this some kind of font encoding mishap? Oddly enough, when copying and pasting affected text blocks, the letters would come out correct.

The train had an unscheduled stop in the middle of nowhere, and I began investigating a bit. My best guess was that this is related to an ancient InDesign bug where certain letter combinations would falsely be treated as ligatures with a seemingly random replacement glyph (in this case, inserting “ā” as a ligature for “hn”). This would explain how the copied text remains intact.

• Weird ligature issues (Feb 2011)
• InDesign false ligatures bug (Jun 2018)
• Variable data problem (Sep 2020)

Here comes the kicker: This wasn’t just an issue with the PDF version! I bought a physical copy of the magazine today, and it seems these typos are all over the print edition as well! That’s a lot of misprints, Stern has a circulation of about 250,000 copies.

Makes you wonder how a mistake like this can happen without anyone noticing… There are at least 30 instances of this throughout the issue!

Bonus guessing: When looking at the codepoints of the contracted letters, we see that they are close to letter pairs that do have a proper ligature. “fi” and “fl” usually have ligatures, and if we modify each letter by +2, we end up at “hk” and “hn”.

Letters	ASCII	Ligature
f i	66 69	U+FB01 = fi
f l	66 6c	U+FB02 = fl
h k	68 6b	U+0100 = Ā (incorrect)
h n	68 6e	U+0101 = ā (incorrect)

Coincidence? I think… maybe! :)

Random stuff I’ve stumbled upon, new and old.
Earlier post: What’s Cool?

• Aira Force 0.9.2
  An intruiging Amiga reverse engineering IDE with an integrated emulator. Those live introspection capabilities of copper, DMA, disk and blitter look promising, as showcased in the demo video running “Another World”. I would love to add something like that to my own Coppenheimer project one day; maybe an interactive tool to analyze tight effect loops. Hmm!
• Robosaurus Spielothek: Another World
  (German) Apropos Another World: Wer Humor mag und liebevoll produzierte Retrospiel-Reviews, muss Robosaurus abonnieren, Punkt! :) Moderne Games, Filme und Event-Berichte gibt es bei Monstershark-Media aber auch. Anspieltipps: Cooking Simulator VR (habe mich eingenässt) und das wahnsinnige Intro zum Amiga 38-Report.
• PTDQ
  A chunky graphics mode for AGA Amigas, based on a clever arrangement of super-hires pixels. Bookmarked for future newschool Amiga endeavours!
• Starpath
  An insightful write-up for one of Hellmood’s latest size-coding masterpieces. My main insight being this: WTF, I’ll never touch x86 sizecoding. :)
• Amiga-Memory: Ein Computer, der uns geprägt hat
  (German) Als Moderator von zahlreichen Computersendungen hat mich Christian Spanik quasi durch meine Jugend begleitet, ich wusste aber gar nicht, dass der „Digisaurier“ Spanik so viele Fachbücher geschrieben hat und ein riesiger Amiga-Fan war! Beziehungsweise ist – siehe Link. :)

I’ve written a ton of little Swing-based Java (and in recent years, Kotlin) tools in my life, but I haven’t used tree views much. So I’m probably twenty years late to the game, but I just learned what you get when you add an empty (!) JTree component to your GUI:

Ravioli and bananas, included in the standard runtime – isn’t that adorable?

And no, that’s not a relict of an ancient JDK version I’m using. At the time of writing, it’s still included in the current OpenJDK…

All of a sudden, my shopping list wanted more attention than usual:

Marmalade and potatoes were not only checked, but dangerously checked! (Because, as we all know, yellow = danger!)

This little webapp is using the default Bootstrap style, which in turn uses the browser’s default checkbox color, blue. I was surprised by this change to yellow, as I haven’t touched the code in years.

After some unfruitful googling (“Chrome checkbox default color yellow” etc. only yields results where someone wants to change their checkbox colors), I noticed something: That yellow/orange is similar to my system-wide accent color! And sure enough, Chrome now uses the configured accent color for certain elements:

Hmm… bold choice. But also weird and irritating – the only other place where Chrome uses system colors is the 1-pixel thin window border. (The window title bar which would normally also display the system’s accent color is overwritten by custom code to render the browser tabs.)

Not sure if I like this change. But hey, at least my checkboxes haven’t turned into circles… yet. :)

My work VM froze and I was staring at the mouse cursor for too long. Mouse pointers used to be a thing of beauty. And symmetrical! :)

Edit: Whoops, “ecce homo” is Latin, of course, “puntatore” is Italian. My modern-day Latin is a bit rusty, so… Ecce index?