No anime ’til Thursday

Red Cat, Cosplay, Furless, Dungeon People, Chibis, and Cheer are not pre-empted by Olympics coverage. Also Elseworld Fail, for those still watching the tale of the catgirl and her novelist.

Good tree, bad tree

The little tree that was underneath the huge (~10-inch diameter, ~50 feet long) fallen branch survived! My arborist and his crew showed up Monday afternoon and cleaned things up.

The bad news is that they have to come back and take out another branch on the big tree (as big or bigger) before it falls toward my house. It probably wouldn’t hit the house, but it would do serious damage to my landscaping, and possibly also to the patio.

I’m having him evaluate the health of all the trees on the side lot, just in case.

The downside of ghost kitchens…

There’s a restaurant I can order bao delivered from, and they’re pretty good. They also sell several flavors of rice bowl, pan-fried potstickers, and steamed dumplings; those are not so good. TL/DR: they’re a ghost kitchen hosted in an Italian restaurant, so pretty much all they know about Chinese food is how to warm it up; this is sufficient for bao shipped to them frozen, but the one time I ordered the “pan-fried” potstickers, they weren’t even steamed well.

(now, ghost kittens, on the other hand…)

I searched for “belfast”, but…

…Google mostly returned keyword matches on ‘northern’ and/or ‘ireland’ instead. This was not useful.

Meanwhile, in a nearby PDF file…

I added a few more boxes to the prototype script, recreating the classic look. Since I support every paper size known to Adobe, I stress-tested the scaling by rendering it on 4x6 photo paper. Credit-card size was a bit too far; the body font ended up at 1.25pt. 😁

Since Platypus isn’t useful to me, I have to write all the line-wrapping and text layout myself, and the only real wrinkle there is ensuring I correctly handle double-width CJK characters when wrapping; I’m not concerned about the language-specific issues of breaking words and strings; this is classic “wrap at column N no matter what” style.

For this particular application, I don’t think I need the really-precise metrics that I developed for PDF::Cairo, which involved pre-rendering test strings in each font and seeing the height and width of what actually gets painted onto the page, but if I do more with Reportlab, I’ll probably need to tinker with reportlab.graphics.renderPM (Cairo) and Pillow’s getbbox().

Comments via Isso

Markdown formatting and simple HTML accepted.

Sometimes you have to double-click to enter text in the form (interaction between Isso and Bootstrap?). Tab is more reliable.