where programming and art collide

I was looking for a higher level abstraction for image creation and finally found one worthy of note. The NodeBox Gallery shows what the toolkit is capable of and is the first accessible drawing library that allows for Tufte's Just Noticeable Differences. I'm only now beginning to explore it, and am uncertain whether it encourages working in JND or the gallery curator just has an eye for such.

In other tech news - by which I mean "news to me" - I'd long had a love affair with the elegance of the TeX typesetting system and the amount of typographical art that Knuth formalized in its page layout algorithms. To my knowledge nobody has bested its running text composition abilities (it may in fact be optimal, see below the fold). But, put simply, TeX is a pain to work with. It is a batch-oriented system dating from the time when editing ASCII markup was quick but page creation couldn't be computed in real time. I'd sort of vaguely thought that computers have become fast enough to do TeX in real-time. Well they had, I just didn't know that the people at LyX had already done it. I was creating good looking documents again within three minutes of installing LyX. I'm perhaps too happy about that.