Sponsors are absolutely indispensable in putting up a show. Let's give a huge round of applause All right, and on that note, I'd like to invite the captain of the ship Mr. Anurag Bhatra chairman and editor in chief exchange for media group and business world to deliver the welcome address I'm a readout from your notes. Don't want to do that. I love to take your feet away Please give Ratnika a big round of cheer She's a very brave person I met her at an event which she was hosting for us on 10th January and you know, I am The one industry that I should be a brand ambassador of is out of home because I spent most of my time out of home But the other industry if I could be a brand ambassador is entrepreneurship and events. These are two things I know a little bit she was hosting a BW disrupt event and you know I have some pet peeves and one of my colleagues did something and you know She saw me in a very aggressive mode and then she she out of the blue texted me and she came to meet me in the office and You know, she's been very brave. So brave people should be celebrated. I'm brave, too I got married 18 years ago. So I think we should celebrate brave people But that's another day today. We're here to celebrate the out-of-home industry I'd like to acknowledge the presence of mr. Stuart Taylor was the global sea of kinetic who's come all the way And we've allowed him without a badge. That's that's because of our respects So please give mr. Stuart Taylor a big round of applause He's the global sea of kinetic. He's been an entrepreneur He served on the board of Guardian. He owned his own radio station and he's done a lot of things before He started leading kinetic My old friend Suresh young friend, but goes back a long time Suresh the fact that you're at kinetic gives us hope because you know group M is the Position and kinetic is at a position where you can grow the industry And if the industry grows you grow I have lots of friends in the room I did work in the out-of-home industry for a little while and my ex-boss yesterday called me and After that sent me a text saying you disappoint me because he sent an article and it wasn't printed in the magazine Sunandan called me wrote it now works for a you know diverse firm which Engages on gender diversity and stuff This is an industry that I know a little bit because I've worked in it It has changed for the positive in the last 18 years that I've moved away from the industry actively I used to be the head of the office of Portland in Delhi. I had the great pleasure of Having team members like Gaur Gupta. That's where I lost most of my hair. He's the sponsor of the event today Right, I he will not come you know some people feel great. Oh, I sponsored the event But I won't show up, you know, it's like a statement of like, you know, like I'm God's gift to humanity But that's okay, which God is a very close friend of mine. He worked with me But I want to tell you that I did work in this domain and I was taking Suresh's viewpoint before I came up The industry has moved forward in a way that it has improved and if you had to take the initiatives that have happened in the last few months One is the you know every Industry has an association which in some way brings some standard practices. It creates a safety net it creates training The outdoor industry out of home industry has the Indian outdoor Association I think in the last Few months the membership has gone from 80 to 350. So that's a very positive step It has involved agencies media owners intermediaries printers Most importantly, it has set up some some standard operating procedures Payments is a big area every association whether it's an INS Or IBF or an outdoor association can help in streamlining payments because I think that's the biggest area where you know In how POS come so things have improved there. Let me also tell you that The media industry is growing our pitch Madison advertising outlook, which is it in its 18th year Forecast that next year the outdoor industry will grow Bigger than the normal average of the growth of the industry And the growth will be more than it was last year if you look at the out-of-home industry on an average It grew by six seven percent the players that grew by ten percent if you look at the other survey which Group M brings out which pitch Madison doesn't bring out. It says our out-of-home will grow at 13 percent So then we're at a inflection point and the beauty about outlook is out-of-home industries That the out-of-home industry is getting integrated with every possible medium. It is getting integrated with television It is getting integrated with your mobile phone in it is getting integrated With Cinema in some way it's getting into it is retail every kind of medium is coming together to you know So out-of-home is really an industry that will grow along with every other domain and sub domain I also want to talk about the fact that since the time we started this forum more than ten years back This is the 11th year transparency and objectivity are two things that have been talked about Ethics, I think we've improved You know we've improved usually because the environment that exists is very competitive Players that are ethical long-term and a partnership oriented are growing I can also point out the fact that they're unique out-of-home opportunities some of those Opportunities are represented in this room for example armor for example bar talk for example Yoma. They're not traditional Out-of-home opportunities and there are many more that I may or may not be aware of Digital screens you cannot talk of any domain whether it's you know a business domain, which is editorial Without talking about digital and digital screens So this was telling me that this commissioner of south Mumbai told the municipal commissioner that they're giving up a giving Floating a tender for hundred digital screens in Mumbai and then they if it goes well as a pilot project. They'll replicate it across Their municipality now if it happens in Bombay it possibly will happen every year Again Because I come from the media domain Apart from exchange for media I'm part of business world So I can tell you that Media as a category relies heavily on out-of-home if you look at out-of-home advertisers media may be among the top five categories For example, if you look at some of the Maki out-of-home spaces Google has taken it up Facebook has taken it Netflix has taken it for some reason that going to Hedrabad very often these days my new investors are from So I have to go there very often and we've been doing events and When I land in Hedrabad the Hedrabad airport, which Possibly some part is with Lakshya at least that part is with Lakshya has this Radha TMT Rana Dugubati, how many of you noticed that?  I know the promoter of Radha TMT is a very close friend of mine I had dinner at his home on last Monday in Hedrabad and he told me how much he paid for it I mean he paid a lot of money, but he's getting an ROI so out-of-home advertising can in a lot of ways You know create that halo and he's doing that when the steel industry is not necessarily doing well So he's spending more money in building a brand. I can keep talking to you about out-of-home I'm not an expert like Suresh or Mr. Taylor So I won't but I just want to tell you that the industry is changing for better If I had to put red flags, I'd like to put three red flags One is I brought the issue of latest issue of business world Which is on women entrepreneurship. It's a survey which says that it's difficult to be it's difficult to be an entrepreneur in India Especially if you don't have hair she ranga. It's easy. You have hair But for other people who don't have hair, it's difficult But for women, it's tough and we did a large survey and we so in in the out-of-home I know your wife is a out-of-home entrepreneur in Calcutta He just told me but mostly the number of women I'm glad I can see some women colleagues here But in the out-of-home industry both at the leadership and the middle level There are less women. I'd like to see those going up.  I keep saying that Second is the fact that agency and owners have to look at a long-term view our industry sometime tends to be very transactional, you know as if you're selling but The best value comes from collaborative partnerships and last but not the least again. This is the issue that is being discussed 18 years back I used to go for meetings My boss would send me to Surandhan would send me to meetings is measurement The out-of-home industry still does not have a robust measurement with the integration of out-of-home industry with every other media I think now is the time for measurement and With people like Suresh at the helm of a leading agency. I see Mr. Sain was also here somewhere. Mr. Bandula You know, he's like the godfather of this industry You are so let's be very honest about it So I just want to say that when we come back next year in my vision for the out-of-home domain is a two-day conference You know, this is a conference. We don't make that much money as we make in other conferences But we don't do everything to make money. We do things to make sure our industry Creates new leaders creates new benchmarks We're able to celebrate the best advertising and we are able to bring out an agenda change and a conversation change So that the leaders of the industry note and it seeps down As Ratnika mentioned tonight, we have the nuance. I can tell you that, you know, I Just came for a you know, I was invited by the ministry to be on the board of these National Entrepreneurship Awards and I looked at their process and they called me to look at the process I can tell you the process was very good and I said that to the secretary that really your process is exceptional But I can tell you that ours are the most honest awards and I can tell you we do awards in every domain and You know, we do it in the news broadcast awards domain and I lose friends every year We do it. I can only tell you that people don't talk to me for two weeks three weeks four weeks five years But really we do it honestly. Nobody in our domain can influence it Whatever we do we can say that we do it with a very and we do it through a jury and again our jury as you will see in the jury AV is such a accomplished and knowledgeable jury and such powerful leaders that be difficult to influence them unless until they Really get influenced by another jury members view. So really tonight when we celebrate the winners in the out-of-home Domain and there are two people awards. I know those are only two awards. I know Who those award-winners are I can tell you if I was on the jury and I know a little bit about this domain and about this industry I would give it to those two people. So I can tell you that if you won I congratulate you if you were in the shortlist. I still congratulate you About 62 brands participated in the awards 40 odd agencies participated in the awards We get we got 350 plus entries we shortlisted 120 and today about 30 odd winners will be celebrated tonight So that's the process. I hope you'll agree with our award winners awards are a lot about three things One it is about perception. I can tell you again. That's an area I know a little bit second it is about elimination awards the process of elimination So you keep eliminating eliminating and third it is the quality of how you present the awards You know, I keep saying to this a lot of my friends reach out, but we did so good work You know our prime minister. I is a great guy. He's leading the country He's there apart from the fact that he's brilliant his perception is bigger than reality You know if he can comes back as the prime minister He'll come back because there is perception is bigger than reality if he doesn't come back Not come back because perception is bigger than reality.  Of course lots of people Priyanka Everyone has supported her but I can tell you that one of our best is running this award In the year where I met two jury members on the flight. I came back from Bombay last night I told you I'm the best guy on out of home I'll be again back in Bombay tomorrow night for our impact of 50 women award then on Friday. I'll be in Calcutta for our real estate conference. I Can tell you that I met two industry leaders. I won't take their names both are Very senior and they had gone for judging of the go-offest and I ended up asking them So how was the judging? How are the quality of entries? What was the quantum of entries? I can tell you the last year because of demodernization GST has been a tough year for advertisers for the industry I think we've done out of home advertising media industry is done particularly well Considering those things. So while the quality and quantity of entries may have not been like the years before I know that this is an aberration this in this is a new normal in some way we'll have to accept it and Hopefully all the good work that the government is doing in terms of infrastructure in terms of creating jobs in terms of making sure India has Marketed you'll see the results of that in terms of the economy doing even better over the next few years. I wish you luck and I hope that I continue to be your friend Even if you win an award or you don't win an award And I'd like to say that out of home industry is that a juncture where it poised to become Mainstream and I remember I wrote this column 12 years back some of you knew in the audience I wrote in this column. I used to write for pitch. Just now there was a time. I used to write a column for pitch I wrote I was in Kans. I used to go to Kans. There was a time. I don't know what doesn't send me anymore, but It was 3 a.m. In the night and I was getting a call from Mukesh Gupta of Graphi said And he's also my neighbor, so I took the call and he said He realized that you know I'm sleepy. I told him I'm in Kans. I was sleeping and he said no, no, I'll talk to you I said no, no, tell me he said I was just ready or article that you wrote in pitch And you know you've been very insulting on the out of home industry because I wrote that in our industry. There is the I Simplified I said TV television Radio and outdoor. I Mean I had to make it simple. I said television is the Brahman's So on and so forth and out of home is whatever you can figure out. Okay. He said that's not good I said you have to read my full column why I'm saying that but I can tell you that if I wrote the same article today You know, I wouldn't say the same where poise we made a significant investments in technology Some of the players represented today are you know investing significantly in technology to make sure the offerings are measurable and that kind of measurability and Honesty will grow the industry. I want to share my last story and I shared this at every out of home conference So Bandula, sir, I got a board over here, so You know, I remember I joined I joined a J. Walter Thompson. I used to be in media planning. Mr. Sanjay Chakravarti used to be the boss, right? Like a young executive at work for four years and Mr. Sanjay Chakravarti was notorious for reading too many newspapers He was always relaxed. I've never seen a boss so relaxed Like he would read newspapers two hours like sit in his cabin and I joined out of Htn and I was given out of home and so London hired me and Then I met Gaur Gupta and I asked Gaur tell me about the industry So Gaur of course told me the right things, but I didn't believe I thought Gaur was lying to me I said these are not possible So one of the things you told me is that there is this guy called Mr. Singh who had said I forgotten even his first name Whatever good. I forgotten some Mr. Singh who used to own lots of shelters and space in Delhi, which he doesn't own So most of you know who I'm talking of and he said he changes shelters two three times a day And he builds all the clients. I said, how is that possible? How can you do that? So I didn't believe it till we used to have an NGC Maruti and one more as a three large client and I remember I Was crossing Asian Games Village complex. There is a bus shelter and as per us there should have been a NGC Holding and there was some other client. So I called Gaur and I called that guy said no, it is not possible It is NGC. I said I'm standing there. I Didn't take a photograph. I don't think there was mobile was that ubiquitous then I came back and on the way back in the night again, I Went to that and he had changed it. It was NGC So, you know, I believe that the you know, I'm I think we've come a long way from Yes, so we've come a long way I'm saying this because this was how out of home was perceived again I said perception is bigger than reality by bringing measurement by strengthening the association by bringing better quality of people By upgrading our beliefs I think we can grow the out of home industry and as I said the neck this year isn't Is an inflection point and the out of him industry will grow more than 11% because that's what we've said the other report says 13% But we'll be happy if it grows 15% so I wish you luck. I'm sure you'll be meaningful partners to the brands that you work with to the organizations that you work with and you will be socially responsible in the kind of advertising you display and We are talking in a time where the me to issue is a big issue where in advertising You started to look at, you know, because I wrote my article yesterday for impact of 15 different What kind of role models we are creating? I don't know how many women winners are there We don't have a women women winner in those two people categories next year. I'd like to see women leaders in this domain


Welcome everyone to my new apartment. Just moved in here yesterday. Big place. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms and this bed is really comfortable. Glad I found the comfortable place to stay. Just been making a video. Lots of new videos coming soon. I may have to do a video out on the balcony as well. Got three big balconies here and a pool area and a gym. So lots of space to make some videos and also for when Nala arrives as well. Shouldn't be too long. This is my little office. Outside we've got the jungle there. Sit in my office chair. Right we've got 25 people in here now. I think it's time to begin. In this one we're going to be talking about when narcissists flaunt their new source. Their new supply. Because you are once their supply you supply them with your attention. Your validation. Your admiration. Maybe you give them money.  You provided them with something. They enjoyed that. At some point they have to get rid of you and find someone else. They find a new supply. And of course it isn't long until they begin to flaunt this new supply in your face. Copy in person. Copy on Facebook. Copy on the gram. But in some way they find a way to flaunt this new source to you. It's actually kind of funny the way they do this because most often they're not even in a relationship with this person. It's not official. They don't have any duties or responsibilities. There's nothing they're accountable for. It's just for their image. It's just to make them look good. And this new source is not doing a fraction of what you were doing. They're not anything special. They're not on top of their game. They're not really about anything. But of course narcissists as we know they are very arrogant. They are delusional. So they will flaunt this new source.  But I know it's funny a lot of you when you see it. You're thinking of it like you could have just hidden that from me. There was no reason for you to show that because it's not even affecting me. But yeah they're doing it to get a reaction out of you. They're doing it to get your attention. They're trying to make you think that they are with someone else and now they are happy. It's all an image. It's perception management. It's an orchestration. Because they know how to plan and coordinate the elements of a situation to produce the desired effect to make you react. They depend on this image. All they care about is how people see them. And that is also the reason why you won't see too many posts. You won't see too many pictures of the new source. Because they ain't all that. They're just very arrogant. They have a high opinion of themselves. They think they're a lot greater than what they actually are. So they don't want you to see too much. Because if they played it like that then they would be putting themselves in possession for you to be laughing at them. You would be laughing at them. Because what you don't know is that they picked this person out of desperation. They were desperate. They felt like they were in a hopeless situation that was impossible for them to deal with. So they had to pick someone because they were willing to do anything. In that moment they were willing to do anything because they were so desperate and hopeless. And they felt like they had no other choice. So they had to get someone. And that is why eventually they get tired of them. They get bored and they're not going to be around them. And then they come up with this false narrative, this story, as though there was something wrong with the new source. There was some reason and some excuse why they had to leave them and then come back to you. But as you should know by now it's all bullshit. They were trying to make you jealous. But it didn't work. They didn't make you jealous because you didn't react. But here's the thing. You have to be really strong, really powerful and confident. If you want to go and flaunt someone in a person's face, if you want to make them jealous, if you want to make them feel bad about themselves, you have got to come strong. You can't come acting foolish.  If this person is meant to hurt you, if they're meant to make you feel a certain way, they're meant to affect you. You can't come like that. You've got to come strong. And this new person they don't even know what they get themselves into. They don't know what they're dealing with. They don't know who the narcissist really is or what they're really about. This is just a distraction. It's something they use in for a short time because they already know this new person ain't about anything. It's just something they use in to hurt you. That's it's only purpose. That's what it's used for. It's not something they're taking seriously. And that's why they're putting it out there to you. But you're not going to see too much. You're not going to hear too much about it because this new person is not on your level. So they will keep them quiet. They do not want them to start talking. That is the last thing they want them to do because they do not want you to hear that. Because then that would make them look bad. And they don't want to look bad. They want to look good. But even the things that you do see whether it's on Twitter. It's on the gram. It's on Facebook. It may even be on TikTok. These things that you do see it's not even official. The narcissist doesn't have any duties responsibilities. They're not accountable for anything. It's just something they use in to make you react really quick. So that they can live in this moment of satisfaction where they can feel like they've won. They've got one over on you. But of course it's only a matter of time until they come back with these excuses. And they make you feel like now you've won. You've won them back. You beat out this other person where really it's all just the game. They put these pictures up for you to see but it's all fake. Just have a good look at those pictures closely. Their smiles are so forced. They're pretending to be happy. But it's exaggerated. It's not real. They are putting on a show for you. You are their audience and they're bragging about all of their stuff. But I promise you if you could be a fly on the wall, if you could see what is really going on, you would be laughing at them because it really is a joke. But of course they will use this to come back to you. Especially if you don't care. Especially if you're not reacting to it. Especially if you're not worried about them. They've got to act like they've got something without you. But it's not real. It's not official and with time you will see that. Anything they have they will destroy it because they're always making the wrong decisions. They have very poor judgment. They don't make the right decisions. So it's not going to be long until you see that. Just give it some time but until that time you will see the illusion a lot of manipulation because they are masters of managing your perception.  They're depressed. They're miserable but they don't want you to see that because if you saw that you'd be laughing at them. You would be laughing because it's a false character. It's a false persona. It is a false identity which they are using to deceive you. To make you feel like you're missing out. To make you feel like you've lost something but you ain't lost nothing. You ain't missing out on anything. It's all an illusion which they are trying to create for you. To keep you under their spell. To make you feel like you're missing out. You've lost something and then they can feel better because you feel like that. Well they've moved on. They're happy without you but they can only get you in the moment. That's the only way they can trick you for a short period of time because they are never happy. How can they be happy when they're always in someone else's business. They're always looking at what someone else is doing.  They haven't got any time to think about their own happiness. They are never happy but they don't want you to know that. They don't need to see it so they will try and make things look good. They've got to try and act like they're happy but that is not what is really going on. They are miserable. They are depressed. They are constantly making mistakes that they regret and they are constantly bragging and boasting about things that they cannot bring into reality because whatever they are trying to make you think that they are doing it is actually the exact opposite. You may feel like you've lost something but the only thing that you have lost is the problem because they were a problem in your life. You didn't miss out on anything and they are not doing better without you. They haven't changed anything about themselves. The only thing that they have changed is the scheme. Their manipulation because now they're dealing with someone else so they have to make slight adjustments to their manipulation but that is the one thing that they are going to change. They're not going to change anything about themselves. They're not going to become a magnificent wonderful person. There's no hidden side of their personality that you haven't seen. What they had to give is what you got. That was it. That's all there is. And all they're going to do with this next person is make these slight adjustments to what that person likes to what that person is interested in. So from the outside it may look a little bit different to what you had with them. And of course it's going to look better in the beginning but have a look again in a few months maybe in one year and see if they are still together. Some of them may still be together but that's only because the new person does not know what they're getting themselves into. They don't know who they're actually dealing with. They don't know that it's a narcissist but just give it some more time and eventually it will fall apart just like it did with you. They cannot sustain anything especially a relationship because remember it's all about them. They only care about themselves. They don't care about anyone else just as they never cared about you. And how can you build anything with that mentality? You can't. So just give it some time and you will see. You will see the results. It's inevitable but many of you you want to believe that they changed. You want to believe that it's something better. Really it's not. What you got from them was exactly what they had to give. Like I said before whatever their name is maybe your narcissist name was Richard. Tell yourself I had the Richard experience. I experienced what Richard had to offer me and that is it. That's all there is. There is nothing else. They don't magically change overnight into this incredible person. That doesn't happen in reality only in fantasy. So yeah it's fake. It's an illusion. All right that's it for today. I enjoyed sitting down my office chair. My little office with the view of the jungle there. Palm trees. Up in the door you can hear the birds singing. Now I'm going to go out and get something to eat and maybe I will do another video later because I am planning on going to the gym. I haven't done a gym video for a while but yeah that's it for now. Thank you all for watching. Please give the video a thumbs up if it was helpful and I will talk to you in another one very soon.


So we're actually starting now, okay? Usually I like to to begin by asking if there's anyone who speaks Polish In the audience I guess not okay. Well, it might come up later, but we'll just power on through so This talk's entitled rethinking font packages and It's rethinking only if you've thought about font packages in the past In particular The subtitle here is from the document down and the document part is the thing that I actually wanted to talk about It's actually my second debconf But it's the first one where I've said anything and it's because I have been thinking about this font packaging issue for a while But first before we get into that a little initial tangent Just to set some context if I look familiar to you It's because I spent about 15 years being a foster journalist most recently with LWN Which is still where you should get your news about free software and open source I still sort of think of myself as as it being a part-time contributor there Even though it's been ages since I've actually contributed something But about two years ago I left to go study typeface design in England at the University of Reading Which is one of the few places where they teach that that course lasted through September of 2017 After that I started consulting at least in theory on on a typographic related things so you know if you if you need help with Open type or Unicode or one of those things come see me I suppose But I got some contracts, but to set it I didn't want to try and fill every waking hour with that sort of work and instead I made a list of other things I could do with my free time that that dealt with fonts and type in the free software world and There was a lot of those everything from from actual design work to The document templates and what we ship with our fonts and that sort of thing But the one I kept coming back to was this big disconnects between how people in the design field Work with their font collection and the way we work with their phone collection on Linux That's because for that year that I was in Reading I spent a lot of time around graphic designers and Book designers and information designers and I got to see how they work firsthand How they select fonts in particular And I think that as far as the the font plumbing goes if we were to examine How things are set up from the workflow or through the lens of the workflow that people in this profession use We'd end up with something really different than the way it is currently configured If you want proof of that just consider the fact that free software fonts on services like Google fonts just dominate The web it's trillions and trillions of hits, but they don't really make a big dent anywhere else and Not a lot of people are using desktop Linux distributions to do typographic work So for the purposes of this talk I'm going to sort of walk through that workflow that I that I got to see firsthand from people and then we'll talk about Where it doesn't match what desktop systems do today and then finally we'll get into how that affects font packaging Because that's one of the big contributions that the Debian project has on desktop font architecture is Debian and Debian derivatives provide the vast majority of the packaged fonts to desktop Linux users so Right into fantasy land it starts here the user is working on a document, okay, and in fact It's a particular document, which is an important specific point to note because each specific project alters something and Whatever that particular document is It's it's going to set the constraints that follow and in this case Let's pretend that it's the annual report for your project and it's a large project So you care about the annual report make the GNOME foundation or I don't know open stack or some enormous project like that You might show this document to people that you hope to get resources from so you're gonna do it, right? and I think the thing to keep in mind is that The context the document is the context in which all further decisions are made and a lot of the workflow descriptions I've seen about selecting fonts sort of leave that out they just say these are selecting a font and I think that puts you in a blind alley and These constraints their requirements and restrictions on what you can and can't do and conditions need to meet Some of which are aesthetic some which are technical that really determines everything that follows So in this case our annual report We're gonna say we're gonna types it at this year in English and Persian We also need to have a few words in Spanish and German like let's say there's some names that we need to do So it won't be long stretches, but we need to make sure the right accent marks and special characters are there and Remember it's going to look good to people who read a lot and who will toss it aside if it looks unprofessional so when we say it's gonna set English and Persian and it's look balanced and it has section titles and it has Images with captions and it has tables of things and all those pieces need to look like they were done correctly Okay, so what is the workflow we use? Well, we open the font manager and If you do a lot of document creation, you probably have a lot of fonts installed a couple hundred maybe hopefully they're good ones And the first thing we want to do is search for fonts that support those design languages mainly Arabic and English and When we say that we search for these things to be designed together That's because they need to look right together on the page You can't have one of them look a lot darker than the other You can't have the lines be off and if you pick a font where the Latin and the Arabic were designed Together, you don't have to spend every waking hour making my new adjustments to the line spacing You can't have things be different optical sizes so that One paragraph takes up a much larger vertical space than the other that sort of thing What happens unfortunately? We don't have a billion choices when we set those constraints. We might find several Let's say several dozen fonts that have English and Arabic together But all of them or most of them are gonna be missing something like they don't have the asset or they don't have this till the over the end Or they are Arabic, but they're designed to support the Arabic language not Persian which is a different style Yeah, and by the way half of them are really funky display types are not for setting text So they look like graffiti or a bunch of balloons or a retro video game or something like that But this is just the start of the process. It's not a problem yet The next thing we do is filter those fonts that we have left four things that have the variations that we need So we need some metallics with some weights Maybe just a bold maybe more than one and we want those optical sizes because we need to have image captions Which are really really small and we need to have titles which are really really big Back to reality the number of alternative the drops obviously when we do this Now we think to ourselves at this point. We could start giving things up, right? We could say we'll just use a different font for the section titles and things that's a possibility It's not the normal workflow and it also just changes the discussion too much So we'll we'll keep searching for the perfect font Next thing we do maybe look at some samples I mean we have a few options left But we need to see that they actually work together in a document that there's nothing unusual about them when you look at a Whole page or a whole paragraph So we open the specimens that came with these fonts see them use And let's say that that causes us to toss something out because a couple of them are really too ornate and they look like Calligraphy like a wedding invitation not really a Document that we would use for business purposes Fine. We have some potential choices left. Okay, so things are not impossible yet We do still need to make sure we have our technical features and in this case because we're doing tables of numbers We need to make sure that we have tabular numbers in the font And we probably also want to make sure that we have lining and non-lining numbers so that when we have Years and things in the running text those look okay, too So what we do is we just keep searching in the font manager for those features And then we hit a dead-end. This is pretty deep into the process. So maybe we just Have only one font left that meets every other requirement, but it doesn't have one thing like it doesn't have tabular numerals That's not an impossible situation to find yourself in So what you do at that point you can pivot you can look for something else you can say well This is just one font Maybe we can find a font with compatible numbers and set the table in that instead So we would look for maybe a font by the same designer Like if the Latin is listed as being a castle on design or a Jensen or something. We've probably got another Jensen somewhere in those hundreds of fonts Or maybe we just know that this is from a particular foundry People don't do crazy things with numbers So we'll look and see if the foundry has another font we can use that will hopefully match and not stand out too much No dice though Maybe we find one other font release, but it's another one of those crazy fonts that we can't use So what do we do then? Well so far we've just been looking at the fonts already installed So we need to see what else is available that maybe we just haven't downloaded on to our machine yet So we use the package manager For the sake of time not going to repeat all those same searches, but it would be basically the same process you look for the The facets of the font family that you need in terms of the language and the features that it supports and the range of variations that it supports and We're just gonna say because it takes us all the way down the path here we don't get any better luck at this point and Maybe we don't actually have anything available to us through the distribution that will do what we want perhaps With a last bit of desperation if we pop open a terminal and we search around with apt cache and Find and that's located whatever else you want But that's not gonna find anything for us In fact, we're dead on this machine. We're gonna have to go somewhere else But that's life. So we start just searching on the web. Maybe we go to Google fonts. Maybe we just look at other sites that deal with fonts and Look at the little sites that the designers have put up describing what their font does Maybe there's more specimens to look at and this time we succeed What happens next is we get a zip file downloaded from this website that has the font We open it up and then there's a download helper that's associated with our web browser that installs upon locally to the machine And it finds that documentation and other stuff in the zip file and puts it in the right places And then we being smart tag this and our font manager so that we know This is what we're using for this particular project and next year when we're doing the report We know we've got at least one font that we can use Okay, so we're done. We found the perfect font How possible is this presently not at all Or maybe barely Why is that? Well, I would say there's a handful of factors starting with the fact that that font manager we used in the first stage doesn't really exist You might remember a program called font matrix a few years ago, which it did exist. It's no longer being developed In fact, I think there are people who make sure it still compiles, but it's it's got limited time left It's on an old version of Qt, so it's not gonna last forever. There is also something called GTK font manager Which is a little bit less full featured and I'll get more in depth into that in a little bit, but it's also not Exactly what we want in this situation In addition to that it's not it's a personal project by one developer, so it doesn't come By default in a GNOME installation even though it's a GTK related app Yeah, we'll talk about that The second factor which is the software center is much the same the software center doesn't have All that information that we were searching on that the font manager did Fortunately, it does have some information It has the names of the font so you can tell Sort of accidentally if it's a big family with multiple styles There's usually a human written description Which gives you information There's a screenshot, but that might be automatically generated And there's some kind of sample, which is a quick brown fox kind of pangram The third factor is the web installation, which is uniformly terrible On Linux today in the sense that nothing happens you get that zip file It looks like this you can open it with the archive manager This is an actual actual font. There's a ton of stuff there There's a lot of files. There's a documentation folder. There's a web folder As you can see there's actually Sources and PDFs of some of that documentation But nothing happens when you quote unquote install it except that It gets put into or the font files the binaries get put into a particular folder in your home directory Another tangent here the reason this is something i'm harping on is that there are only two ways that you get fonts onto a system these days With a little bit of an asterisk You either either comes through the package manager or it comes off the web Now the third option is that you build the font locally and install it But that's sort of a different piece entirely And hypothetically there would be a fourth one which is a synchronization service But no one currently offers that might come in the future. We'll see But that's why that matters because if it doesn't come through the distribution it comes from the web The fourth factor Distribution packaging infrastructure Doesn't really support the user's needs. It supports os integration In other words when you copy that font from the zip folder or wherever else into your dot fonts directory That makes it available to the operating system. It doesn't make it available to the user In the meaningful sense that we were looking at in that workflow example Which is kind of the big dichotomy Of fonts because there are software and content at the same time All right, they contain executable Instructions that get run by an interpreter But they are also a page element that the user is actively interacting with and manipulating as part of the design process And the software stack basically just supports the os part of that the software part The fifth and final factor is that font packages themselves tend not to be very rich items This varies a lot to be sure but on the whole they're minimal. They contain the binary and not a whole lot else Um or as unnamed source Richard Hughes put it we package them like their cli apps even though that's not what they are So, um I guess the thesis of looking at this example is that When we don't address that content dimension with the software stack Then we give users no choice but to go elsewhere for their information about what's in the font and what I can do What those features are there's a lot of websites where you drag and drop a font and it shows you what the features are and things like that Fortunately, I think all of those Factors are addressable. Some of them are already in the process of being addressed because people do care about this stuff And I would break it on it to sort of three dimensions although I should point out that the dimensions are not even euclidean and separate from each other But you know, we'll see the first one is is metadata Which is what we talked about in all those searching and filtering examples. The second one is those resources that come in the font Download packages that we don't don't want to do with and the third one is package behavior and although I'm kind of targeting this talk at people who maintain font packages The other things are important too because I think if you're a font package maintainer, you ought to know what Is happening elsewhere in the stack. So let's look at the metadata example first As we noticed most of the searching and the sorting in that workflow example was done on metadata not on actual glyphs in the font um this Is a screenshot of gtk font manager It has a little bit of metadata there. It has a weight width and style which are Directly read from the font binary tables and those are actually pretty old. That's sort of the microsoft way of dividing up fonts It's not necessarily helpful to you. What does medium mean exactly in this case? What's normal? It also shows you that it's proportional The spacing thing is just whether it's monospace or not that very rarely comes up in making documents You can also see a sort of a waterfall example little bit of context there It's automatically put there. So if you're looking at a font in a different language that doesn't really show you Accents and extended latin characters and things And it also fails around then so it's not It's detecting something and not showing you what things is there Uh But mainly I think The the issue here is that this is just reading static information from the binary and showing it to you It's a good start, but it's not what you need to work with a collection or a library and in my opinion, I think Working with a collection is something users are used to doing with like their audio their music collection And if you look at an audio player Most of the screen real estate there is devoted to showing you metadata And giving you ways to search it and sort it and and manipulate the collection through that metadata That's a rhythm box This is you know music. It's just it shows you there's more than one way to look at the same collection and then there's auxiliary tools like easy tag which allows you to You know correct that metadata that's kind of taboo in fonts historically because I think the commercial proprietary font Business is concerned about people falsifying information and changing the license and things like that But in a lot of cases there's just metadata that you could have in there that would help you when you're searching and sorting But we don't have tools for doing that on the desktop So you have to sum up the metadata for fonts can be hard to get to and And it's also sort of split up in different locations like at a practical level There's several pieces in the desktop environment that that read it But they're disjoint from each other There's a little bit in a software center. Like I mentioned, you might even have a screenshot which is metadata That's handled by AppStream, which is the specification that a lot of software center style applications use these days GTK font manager as I mentioned is just showing a few things from the binary And there's font config which knows some stuff about each font not everything Pango also if it's in a GTK stack is recording some metadata And then there's also some metadata in the font package. You may have screenshots and other information there too So yeah, those are different places and they're not unified So that means that some of that metadata is duplicated in different Places and some of it is just missing altogether. One thing it's missing though is a desktop wide or per user cache of the metadata And I think it's possible that there's interest in making that happen Which I'll Talk more about in a bit But yeah, because there's so many pieces that need access to metadata about the font It makes sense to not duplicate it So just for the for the context when I say metadata Here's a dump out of a table that I made trying to track what different Applications from that previous slide Store there's everything from the copyrights and the trademark notices in the font To what language is designed for just you know, the weight class Panos venridae there's urls for You know the designer and the foundry is a color font If it is a color font, how many layers is it? Is it for vertical layout that sort of thing the last one down there? Pretty important user tags If you want to see the table of this stuff, I put it on a Snip it on git lab It is a Markdown render into html, which means it's kind of ugly, but it's a start And so let's let's talk a little bit about the actual metadata options we have today app stream Which is that that pre-installation material you might see Fortunately fonts are a top-level object in the app stream spec. You have software packages And there's a few other things like codecs that have sort of a special category But the the font spec just defines a handful of a field source including Provides which is where you tell it what font face is included and you can have more than one of those So you can't indicate that the package contains multiple styles and variations and The other good news is that the app stream team has been open to Expanding this I opened an issue on this and suggested a few more sort of simple editions The designer name and Foundry name were pretty obvious because those are things that Are very high-level you could obviously go all the way down into those 50 metadata Elements, but that's probably not worth it I added The url type for the specimen there because there's a lot of websites that are a specimen for fonts And that that might be something you look at before you install it and and the reserve font name one there is sort of a another tangent AppStream uses spdx software packet package data exchange format to specify licenses That can make it tricky because there aren't a whole lot of font licenses currently supported And look at the wide range of weird fonts and weird licenses out there So I've I've tried to move that forward a little bit too and particularly I want to add support for showing that an OFL licensed font has a reserved font name because that can be important if you're needing to modify it or something But moving on other good news on this metadata front is that matias classon who's A gtk maintainer these days has been reworking the font selection dialogue And that should be rolling out in september with the 3.24 release This is a screenshot of one of his earlier attempts He's in particular been focused been focused on showing variable fonts support And on showing open type features. This is a newer screenshot where you can You see that you can manipulate things and the examples that he's showing there of the Letter case and actually in the next screenshot you can see some of the stylistic alternates That's kind of important because that allows you to see what the open type feature actually does And it turns out that can be tricky knowing what sample string the show I mean it's pretty obvious for slash zero what you want to show but For these stylistic alternates and for some of these contextual chaining things You could either look into the font and try and parse the whole G sub table, but that's a lot of work and a lot of time Or you could maybe just try and find a good word, but then you have to have a dictionary at words So we've we've Decided it may be necessary to extend the spec and include a little sample string in the open type table That's possible. That's already available to you in the character rearing it feature, but not everywhere But there's more happening as well more potentially good news From the gnom community. I should apologize that I don't really know the kde side of the story very well But I did bring up at gwadak a few weeks ago This can we do better with that downloaded zip file question? And the answer is probably exactly what form that's going to take is a few releases away. Maybe There's interest in handling that better in particular You can install things like documentation within the user's home directory and dot local slash share slash doc So it's possible It's just not obvious necessarily how to automatically do that for any browser that the user might choose and also Yeah, there was some interest in maybe having a database of the font metadata at the at the desktop level I mentioned when I was talking there that this is the kind of thing that tracker normally does in the gnom system It handles all your photo metadata and all your music metadata That might not be the way forward because Tracker is really for user level applications And this is stuff that needs to be accessible to pango and these lower level libraries as well But there's interest in moving forward on that which is really good news Uh, the next major dimension here is What we actually do about those resources in the downloaded zip file, which also exists In a lot of ways or sorry in a lot of cases In distribution packages too and when I say resources we're talking about anything other than the font binary That comes packaged with it from upstream For example manuals Sometimes there's user documentation. It's like a guidebook It can include specimens which are showing the font and use it can include maybe Uh, png screenshot, maybe several There might be a little miniature website That's a resource and at least having a link to it is something and there can be Sort of example code in particular for web content Wow, that's really acting odd, isn't it? Keith, Keith, why didn't you say something? It looks really nice on this screen Um, so there's a wide variety of pieces of uh Ancillary auxiliary material here is what I'm getting at and um In a lot of cases distro packages will include some of this and for debian The material has to meet the free software guidelines So if it's a pdf, but we don't have the source that rebuild the pdf Then it might get taken out by the packager Um, almost always when the font Designer makes the package themselves you get a ton of stuff I'm going to show you some examples of the kind of material That's in one of these this is from um An arabic font called awami and it has a lot of detailed information in the manual about how to access certain alternates Uh for stylistic variation And this is kind of the kind of thing that's important for linguistic reasons Uh Sort of the other end of the spectrum. This is a font called bungee Which is uh one of the very few open source color fonts It has multiple layers And there's about an eight page Micro website about how to combine those and this is why we call a documentation if You were to just dive right in without reading that you would not figure out how to combine all of those and get all the styles that you want so that can be important stuff and uh Not just for aesthetic reasons This is from eb garamon which it has a manual that's probably 20 pages long I think And there's detail on here about not just what the ligatures and things are but in some cases why they exist Which is sort of interesting background information um And and you know understanding the intent can be helpful to you You wouldn't need to know If you do know that this font is designed to look like a renaissance typeface That's worth knowing When I say specimen that was listed separately from documentation that generally means something like this. This is from gentium Which is a really famous large open source family And these are usually designed as pamphlets or booklets They look like marketing material because in the commercial world they are marketing material But even for open fonts you'll typically get it as a pdf as opposed to some other Document format It might be really simple and just show you the characters in the big block But more often it showcases the font and use In paragraphs and in whole mock documents and things and that's really the value of it is it allows you to see context for entire sentences and words A lot of times these days this will be done on the web as well. This is from Yersa and you know, we can at least link to those even if we don't have a copy locally And this is not purely an aesthetic thing Specimens can make or break your ability to tell if the font is functioning correctly This is Bengali And If you can see there are characters that are attached above and below There are some things that combine together But if you were to look at gtk font manager in that grid, you can't tell if any of those functions actually work So seeing the specimen lets you see that it works correctly in text As you need to set text Anyway Whatever you think of any particular document type all of those resources currently if they end up anywhere Get dumped at the user share doc and I guarantee you no one looks at them again We could do better It's my only point there You could capture their existence and treat that as metadata to show the user in different places We could maybe even tie them into system services And here's where we enter the third dimension Which is to say that it doesn't have to be just a static reference What i'm really thinking of here is that If the file resource is something readable by the help system We could place it in user share help will automatically get picked up By the help browser like yelp I know that's a huge change But I will say like that change alone putting a help document In a different place makes it accessible to the user in the desktop help system And that's huge type foundries complain about this mac os users complain about this because no other operating system does this It's a source of frustration the trick is Whether you have something readable or not and we're really getting into the package changes now It's a real issue Yelp is capable of reading a few formats like man and info natively html is fortunately one of those But in all likelihood For debian font packages there could be some work involved And of course, it's not entirely clear sometimes what constitutes help and what constitutes just general information Do you need the renaissance references? Is that help or is that just documentation for your own edification? It's it's nebulous Here's another example from the same ebgaramon This one is a little bit more like help in my opinion um So he mentions Here for instance j was not a separate letter at the time And so one of these character variant features replaces all j's with an i Okay, that actually might be helpful to know and so it's Not just telling you what the feature does about why And I think that's right on the border between Something that's documentation. That's something that's helpful when you're trying to choose the font Um sort of the other side of this another example from the the arabic font is that Okay, one of these is arabic style one of them is urdu style You need to know that if you're a native speaker of the language you might recognize it automatically Otherwise this helps the user um, but yeah that That notion of taking documentation out of user shared doc and putting it into user share help or wherever else probably means work because It means pulling some information out of pdfs. Maybe um The upstream maintainer may not want to do this. They may not have looked at the font in 10 years And changing install paths means You know monkeying with your package And it's always possible. There is someone who knows that you have something in user shared doc and will get upset to find it gone And and the other thing I have to acknowledge here is that Changing this to tie into system help is a big chicken and egg issue because Users are accustomed to not having any help Are they going to discover it? I don't know At worst, it's a no op if they don't know that it's in user share doc. They won't know that it's in user share help But at least in this chicken and egg issue Someone knows where the eggs are And that's that's that's yelp or whatever the kde equivalent is Uh, so there's a few other things just moving on still on the package behavior front where I think we can improve Consistency is not perfect when you look at your font library as a whole And I mean it's fine down to a point, but this is just a random selection of font package names So the first one there cross core is a set of like unrelated style Fonts that just sort of come from the same Uh development projects Dejabu core is one font george williams is a designer's name Guccier is a language Fonts awesome is a web resource. That's not a font at all Indic actually Guccier and indica both meta packages, but there's issues with that too Sil Ezra the s i l is a font foundry Ezra is the name of the typeface gs fonts is totally different Any font it doesn't even have the same prefix as everything else. So yeah, we could probably do better there Same is true with the install paths In a lot of ways people Install to use your share fonts and then the file type, but it doesn't always work that way here again, uh no toe at the top is A mega family from google Lay to orlanto and this is where we need someone to speak to polish is one particular Small family by the same person And then you have low heat which is split Bengali and awesomes into two directories there even though it's the same writing system Bang extra is not a meta package like guccia was that's a set of unrelated fonts that just happened to support Bengali Semiac ends up in two different places and then joint fallback doesn't even end up under The same director is everything else and then the last one down there sorts mel that is the uh, let's see what is that? gaudy book letter maybe but the issue is that it has a sort of Dump everything in the same place Approach including some otfs some ttfs and some sfd's which are a font for source files They all end up in user share fonts Yeah, sure. There's nothing insightful about me saying let's fix some bugs in packaging We all want packages to be excellent. I agree I'm only mentioning it here because this having better consistency across the font library can't help with that big font dichotomy about the software and and content issue because well, um, that even has a large influence here and These are rough numbers google fonts about 848 families open font library Almost any one can upload things there So it's got more but that means Is third on the list and it's a little hard to count some distributions um, so consistency is a good example for other people and but also The name and of the package and the fallback path Are are in the path are our fallback mechanisms. So ideally the font manager will exist and give you the ui you need to find stuff Failing that the software center helps you find stuff failing that you can drop down a command line and figure out where something might be if you have it And there's also maybe some technical reasons to think about Being ultra ultra consistent on this sort of thing Like the gtk font explorer example I mentioned earlier if you want to provide a link to a pdf specimen or documentation in that then you have to Find your way backwards from the font explorer to where that directory is in user share or whatever That's not obvious that the faces that Are available that high up in the stack might be virtual faces like serif And that means going through font config. So if there's a little more consistency, it's a little easier to maybe find your way down to the right place Personally, I would like to see Debian font packages adapt the two-tier scheme where you include the foundry name And I know that's controversial It's sort of weird To some people but some packages do it already I've got a couple reasons for that the first is that you can always have name collisions Because people aren't necessarily creative about choosing their font names and most people don't really search to see what names are taken Also, it sort of mirrors the the metadata structure of audio tracks, which is artist album track and in this case There's not really a good way to put the the artist in there because fonts have multiple designers It also just communicates that relationship to the user which is helpful in certain situations And reality is that you want to coexist with these fonts people are downloading from the web And when people download from the web, they put them in folders and organize them in this fashion You might dump all your fonts into separate folders The first few times that eventually you realize that more than a screen worth and it's too complex So you start sorting them yourself And and yeah, that would involve Adopting this method adopting this model would involve packages changing some things and I want to be careful About just telling people that they should go do this. I understand it could be a sensitive issue So I'd love to get some feedback on it The final I think it's the final sensitive issue I would bring up is that when we talk about metadata, we don't always have everything we need in the font and It'd be nice to say well, we'll just add it All right, but if the upstream author doesn't want to make a help file for you And if they don't want to add fields to the name table that include the designer name and URLs and things like that What do you do and well Making your own html help file is one thing patching the font binary really different You might just be adding to the font with with metadata, but For an ofl font with a reserve font name that triggers You having to rename the font and also it can just irritate people So yeah, it could be controversial to actually do that if you're the packageer I would say that's one of the main challenges And it could be hard to get the information you need from upstream At all like why exactly does this feature exist? Upstream may not even have Version control that you can get them to agree to use in which case you're going to be maintaining that patch against the font perpetually And then yeah, you just by doing this you could upset the upstream author You could upset downstream users you could upset strangers, I guess And then it's just going to be a compatibility issue perhaps for people who Get your patched version of the font with excellent metadata And then they talk to their friends who don't have that metadata metadata and they get confused But I I think it's still worth considering because All of these little changes to packages Including some extra metadata fields including some bdfs Making some help files that is what incrementally moves you towards the white screened fantasy land examples early on And then it's it's all I have to say on the subjects As I said This is me saying Hey font packages you should do stuff So I would really like to hear back from other people who are maintaining font packages As to what parts of this sound crazy and what parts of it Sound slightly less crazy So if you don't have a question right now There's lots of ways to contact me Any method you choose is fine by me But we've got about five minutes if anyone has comments or questions right now They're welcome Thanks Uh-oh All right. Yeah, I do know that you maintain some font packages I do maintain a font package. Um, I think your idea of putting the font packages in in well-defined directories is a great idea Um, we can just put that in debbing policy. It's really easy to do I don't think it'd be any controversy there The nice thing about policy is that it's it's a place where people look to see what they should do Policy is never a place that says what you must do Um having guidance for packages is always helpful packages are always looking for what should I be doing here Not what I must do Could we put the metadata this extra metadata just in the same directory as the fonts there is a well-defined location for each face Now for each family Yeah, could we just put the could we construct a file format to put the metadata Alongside the fonts in the same directory because we given that they're given that we have the font path information We could construct the file name for the metadata and go find it pretty easily with that work in theory. Yes, absolutely The the trick there is and this this has come up before the gtk folks ask this question. Yeah um For the general use case if you're the font publisher having to maintain those two fonts is not ideal But if you're the font publisher put it in the font file, right? So for us who are downstream There's not already an obvious Metadata sidecar format we could probably find one that's compatible somewhere and that would be interesting to do But let's see what else was I going to say about that Yeah, I think at this point that's that's probably the the big hurdle is that we have to determine what format to save that in So somebody with font expertise Might want to actually come up and specify a format And then build a library that would allow you to get at that right and yeah So somebody with experience the field of typography right a degree in that area that kind of person Yeah, well And you know the thing is that you you want to do that in conjunction with whatever's happening with Trying to track it in a local local database So is is font config a place to is is font config a database that should contain that additional metadata information? um So my impression from a brief conversation with font config folks is that's a little too much It's a little it's a little bit outside of font config's original Intent and so maybe that's not Maybe that's overkill for having font config do it, but I think like there was interested in having somewhere in the Not config where no other stuff you anticipate that metadata being used for font matching or font location Or is it just really for User just user some user interface discovery mechanism. Well, there's a lot of potential uses for it and The other the other big one other than just the user facing stuff is what do you do when you need to replace a missing font in a document Exactly And so some of that metadata could be used if not to automatically choose a replacement font to guide you Towards a good replacement font And and then there's potential uses that are in other fields like linguistics and translations I don't I'm not a translator, but I know that translators have a lot of tools their disposal and Good language support and knowing stylistic things can be important to them So I would say those are orthogonal use cases It's not all just showing the user stuff to to play around with So there may be some synergy with font config, but it might not be the same thing But you might have a tool that would run over the font config database and discover and and construct or discover this additional metadata Okay, yeah Parts of the the metadata you mentioned like you supported character sets supported languages This would be something that I think would be very interesting to have in font config because this is important if I select the font right and and In case I wasn't clear the the The git lab Table that I mentioned includes what font config currently does track and it does include some of that stuff I don't remember that if it's a language thing or not that the language terminating language support can be tricky And because people don't always agree on what support means So in this in the sense, I would strongly support to to add Even though it's an ad hoc decision to a specific definition for a sidecar for fonts Where we can save to meet that that of course we can if there is support from other libraries However, we can always change the sidecar definitions, whatever It sounds good. I was just given the flag that we all need to rush outside for the group photo So I guess we're out of time But thank you for your comments and we can keep talking During the group photo, maybe even no we're going All right. Thanks. Thank you very much


The signal oil program the whistler is your signal for the signal oil program The whistler and the whistler and I know many things for I walk by night I know many strange tales hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak Yes friends it's time for the signal oil program the whistler Independent research rates it the most popular radio program on the pacific coast Remember let every traffic signal remind you with signal new signal gasoline You do go farther than ever Look for signals big yellow and black circle sign that identifies those popular signal stations in seven western states from canada to mexico And now the whistler strange story The stray dream Chris claggett was never meant to commit murder He knew it the minute he did it But of course it was too late then the minute it was over and he looked down at steve robinson lying there on the floor He knew that nothing would be the same after it That no matter how perfect it was no matter how thoroughly he outsmarted the police The big battle was going to take place inside himself in the middle of his mind He felt it even stronger two hours afterward as he paced the floor of his apartment Waiting for the telephone call that was bound to come sooner or later Trying to read and throwing the magazine aside mixing drinks and pouring them down the sink Lighting cigarettes. He was too nervous to smoke waiting Waiting Kathy was bound to call she had to discover it sooner or later Five minutes of two the night before Easter steve working late at the florist shop But she'd know he couldn't be working that late She'd go down to see what was keeping him And then she'd call Chris was ready for it an hour ago with just the right amount of surprise and shock But now at five minutes of two he didn't know The waiting was getting him In the silence, there it is Chris Kathy dear, you know better than to call me at this time Chris listen to me Something terrible has happened. What's matter the flower shop when he didn't come home. I went down and Let me call the night editor first. I'll be right over The waiting is over You carried it off pretty well, didn't you just the right amount of surprise and shock But there's a strange new feeling inside in the pit of your stomach something you've never felt before And the sight of steve lying where you left him on the floor of the back room of the flower shop Surrounded by banks of easter lilies and roses Brings the feeling to a dangerous pitch You're thankful for your training.  Probably struck from behind as he was working at this bench Yeah, but how did the guy get in didn't have to get in gibson could have reached in this open window Oh claggett. Yeah You'd better go and find your story. I don't think anything else will break tonight just photographs fingerprint man and that sort of thing All right lieutenant. It's tough. I know all murders are tough I think the flowers here are what make this one so horrible All this beauty and ugliness In the same little room He was a friend of yours, wasn't he? Yeah I'd better go lieutenant What'll I tell mrs. Robinson tell her I think she's had enough for one night I'll uh, see her tomorrow afternoon. Okay Pretty terrible kathy What What did lieutenant nelson say? You can go now. He'll see you tomorrow afternoon I uh, I gotta file my story That's something isn't it me filing the story about steve Please chris. I'm sorry. I just I know chris I I don't know what I'd do if If you weren't here, I'll always be here kathy Remember that will you? Sure chris. I'll remember That's the right balance chris just enough grief and just enough business as usual The outside battle is going well, isn't it tonight the reporter carrying on in spite of everything Tomorrow a little less grief a little more business as usual at the city editor's desperate Ah just a minute halloween. I tell you I'm right chief the door into the into the sales room was locked. You're sure Of course, I'm sure why I remember that's the trouble. You think you remember where's chris over there at the counter All right, we'll see now chris. Yeah, come here a minute. I'll show you what I mean halloween It's matter chief oh halloween here is doing a feature on the murder He says the door into the sales room was locked. Yeah, will you? Yeah, it's a second Uh, let me see Oh, here we are The door had a Yale lock, but it was on the latch and the bolt above it was open I see now wait a minute There was a triangular rubber door stop against it on the workroom side so it couldn't have been used as an exit That's it. See what I mean halloween. He doesn't trust his memory. He takes everything down. Oh, that didn't seem very important How do you know it's not important take it down? Anyway, I was so busy always chris doesn't matter How busy you are a first-class man makes notes without even thinking about it, right chris? Yeah I suppose so you see halloween. That's what I mean by a reporter You're an expert a precision machine Accurate to a millionth of an inch never wrong on a fact never guilty of bungling errors like the other reporters And because you used the same methods to kill steve robinson the outside battle was over before it started Three months later the case is shelled Kathy's yours chris. She's mrs. Claggett now You have what she said how to get Why don't you forget about the battle that's still going on inside? Chris yeah, Chris where the roses I put on the mantle Rosa yeah on the green base on the mantle there. Oh, yeah. Well, they they're kind of wilted I threw them out Well, Ted Oh chris. I just got them from the florist yesterday. Why must we always have flowers kathy? Well, because I like well, I don't What's the matter dear ever since we got back from I just don't like flowers kathy. Is there anything wrong with that? Well, don't jump at me I'm sorry What's wrong chris? You used to send me flowers before steve and I know it You don't have to tell me it's very simple kathy. I don't like flowers because they remind me of steve That's why I want them. Huh? They remind me of steve too chris I like to think of them once in a while. Why? Because I loved him kathy.  I was fond of him too. He was my best friend But we're not living in the past keeping him in front of us all the time isn't going to help Well, is that why you're objected to living here? Of course. He's here in the house with us everywhere I turn I see him knickknacks of his all over the place is picture on your dresser. I thought you understood when we were married. I guess I didn't Oh, excuse me kathy.  They cover the walls. They flow down over the judge's bench and up the aisles the scent of them is almost sickening There's a strange cold feeling inside you. You take in all the details the judge the jury the counsel for the defense and the prosecution Then your heart almost stops As you realize that the man on trial for murder Is you Wait a minute. Let me explain. You got me all wrong. No, no, listen. I didn't Usually I have two cups. I think I'll cut down a little. I Didn't sleep too well last night.  I I had the feeling when I woke up this morning. I've been talking in my sleep You remember hearing anything? You must have something on your conscience, dear It's a good thing Kathy sleeps soundly You don't remember what you said, but no matter what it was it would have sounded bad under the circumstances You feel better that afternoon as you take Kathy downtown for a beauty appointment and get into the swing of things at the office Then that evening don't you think it might be a good idea to call off our bridge date with the bartons tonight You seem so tired. Yeah, I could use some sleep You know, I've been thinking all afternoon about last night. What do you mean? This morning when you asked me I didn't remember anything unusual, but This afternoon the strangest feeling came in. You mean you heard me heard what?  I'd been talking in my sleep. No, I didn't hear anything I was just sitting here reading when I suddenly realized I had a funny dream. Oh, yeah Well, maybe it's because of the roses roses. Yes, you remember we talked about them before going You mean you dreamed about roses? Yes, all all mixed up with something about a trial and a courtroom court Kathy, are you sure? What's the matter chris? Is that all? Well, that's all I can remember Chris What's the matter? I I don't know with the prologue of tonight's story the stray dream Signal brings you another strange story by the quistler In place of the message about signal gasoline usually heard at this time on the whistler signal oil company has asked me to talk with you about something much closer to the heart About someone you may have forgotten to put on your christmas list I'm talking about a service man One who won't be able to be home with his family and friends this christmas because he's in a hospital Recovering from wounds he suffered fighting for his country and for you Can't you imagine the happiness it would bring some service man on christmas morning to receive a gift? He wasn't expecting that would tell him as nothing else could that he hasn't been forgotten Needly a large gift, but it should be something appropriate something he could use And the red cross is ready to help you by suggesting the right gift for the right man Just call the camp and hospital committee of your local red cross And tell them you'd like to send a christmas gift to a service man. They'll give you the necessary information Now on christmas morning You'll be twice as happy because you'll have brought a ray of happiness to someone who gave so much To give us the best christmas gift of all peace Remember the place to call is the camp and hospital committee of your local red cross don't put it off Call tomorrow, won't you And now Back to the whistler first time in your life. You're beginning to lose faith in yourself The shadow of a doubt is slowly making itself felt inside you You keep telling yourself it must be a coincidence How else could you and kathy have had the same dream at the same time a courtroom filled with roses? Yet she couldn't have pulled that one out of the air. It's too fantastic. It can't be coincidence Yet what else can it be?  Four o'clock for why? I couldn't sleep You mean you had another dream. I don't know. What's the matter with me chris. It it's so So did you have another one? Tell me like chris. I'm sorry Tell me about it It was it was just like before the courtroom and the judge but But what? It it wasn't roses this time chris It was Easter lilies. See me chief. Yeah, I just wanted to talk to you for a minute. What's wrong chris? What's eating you? Well, I don't know I for years I point you out to all the cubs as a shining example everything a star reporter should be And suddenly your stuff starts coming in so garbola can't use it. Nothing wrong chief I don't hand me that I know you too well Something's eating your heart out and I want to know what it is. It's none of your business It is my business When the best man on my staff turns in a story on the shake-up at the city hall full of scrambled references to Roses and Easter lilies. You can bet you're assured. It's my business What was that you heard me? I I guess I've Just been working too hard Is that all yeah Yeah chief that's all I doubt it. You've been through a lot tougher grinds than this and I've never seen you fall to pieces yet What's the matter chris?  I told you that That there's nothing the matter. I just need a rest. All right, then take one a long one How long as long as you want on full salary and don't come back until you can write a straight story Oh, yeah chris. Howie, uh Didn't you do a story once on a professor over at the university something about experiments on Extrasensory perception or thought transference or something. Uh, yeah, his name was Duncan, I think Where'd he do? What was it all about? I don't remember very well I I think they'd line up a batch of students at one end of a room and have them concentrate on numbers Yeah, that was it and then another group would try and write the numbers down What's his name again? Duncan charles. Duncan I rarely don't like to appear too definite on this mr. Claggett Nothing has been proved conclusively. You mean there's no such thing as thought transference professor. Duncan. It's hard to say It's a very unscientific attitude to take Assuming that two minds are uh in tune so to speak But we have found rare cases in which there seems to be no other conclusion I see Uh Does distance seem to make any difference? Oh, yes, I would say it cuts down the possibilities considerably Thanks professor. That's the only way you can explain it. Isn't it chris? You and kathy must be one of the rare cases the professor talked about there's no other answer It's madly to have carried it off so perfectly to have won the outside battle so completely Only to lose your grip on the secret by your asleep and the bars are down And there's only one defense isn't there chris? He said the distance did make a difference Hello, darling Chris what in the world are you doing home so early? Oh, I had a talk with jones. He says I need a rest Well, he's right. So how would you like to go away for a couple of weeks? Where? Oh Tahoe maybe well, I I think that's a wonderful idea chris. Did you be ready this afternoon? Well, I don't know. It's a rush or There would be much packing we just knock around our old clothes. Well, I'll try great. Great. I knew you would what about you Well, I was about to tell you I'll have to join you later. There's some things. I got to clear up, you know Why can't I wait we could go up together now? Don't be that way darling. I want you to have it already for me when I arrive I'll get your reservations on the three o'clock train. How about Well, all right chris great. Well, gee look at the time. We got to hurry come on. I'll help you Well chris.   I can't stand this any longer. I killed him because I loved his wife. I thought I'd I'd be happy, but I was wrong. I I don't care anymore. I I don't Oh good lord Speak to mrs. Claggett, please just a moment. I'll call back. Oh kathy. Hello chris. Where have you been kathy? I've been calling you since eight this morning. It's four o'clock. I know it. Why didn't you answer? You're lying. No, chris. It's impossible. You couldn't have it was you. I tell you chris. Listen to me You've got to let me explain Don't do anything. Don't see anybody. I'll be on the next train. It leaves berkeley in an hour Way out now chris. It's you. You did it once and got away with it You're wondering now whether you can do it again, but there's no alternative is there It's you or kathy That's why in five minutes past midnight you're at martins cove walking through the darkness Behind the low hotel cabin You know kathy's a number 16 and at this hour she'll be sleeping You keep well in the shadows of the trees at the edge of the cabin area 14 15 16 this is the one The window's open You can see her head on the pillow You pull out your revolver You wish there were some other way But there isn't Just a moment now Hey, where do you drop that gun? I got him. Let me go. I said drop that gun Nelson you can come along peacefully or you can come feet first at the moment. I am not particular The whistler will return in just a moment with a strange ending of tonight's story Meantime here's an interesting feature about the new 1946 cars One of the leading sixes advertises 25 to 30 miles per gallon And throughout the field auto manufacturers are stressing increased mileage This is being done not just as a matter of economy, but because mileage is the result of better performance A proof of greater efficiency Well, as you know signal gasoline has long been famous as the go farther gasoline But here's the important point Signal oil company always quick to give the motoring public the advantage of new trends new improvements Has actually engineered new signal gasoline to help you go farther than ever How a signal did it involves a long scientific explanation about rearranging the atoms in gasoline molecules To give amazing new power to new signal gasoline The immediate noticeable results of this new power are quicker starting faster pickup and higher anti-knock But because this increased power means you'd be shifting less and shifting is the demon that wastes gasoline Your speedometer will prove to you that it's a fact you do go farther than ever With new signal gasoline And now back to the whistler So you finally lost the inside battle didn't you chris?  What are you talking about? You didn't really think that you and your wife were dreaming the same dream did you? My error you must have or you wouldn't have tried to kill her She wasn't asleep on that first night chris.  I was writing it was real the writing was real at least You almost had us stumped though when you set her up here We had to wait three hours until you went out for lunch to get into your house and find the notebook She couldn't answer you when you called of course until we got to her by telephone and told her what she had dreamed last night Well That's it You were too good a reporter chris a guy who can take notes without thinking should never take a crack at murder Especially if he walks in his sleep We'll bring you another strange tale The whistler is broadcast for your entertainment by the marketers of signal gasoline and motor oil and fine quality automotive accessories And by your neighborhood signal dealer This program produced by george w allen with tonight's story by harold swanton music by wilbur hatch Is transmitted to our troops overseas by the arm forces radio service It's your signal for the signal oil program the whistler This is marvin miller speaking reminding you to look for those familiar yellow and black circle signs That identify those popular signal oil stations in seven western states from canada to mexico This is cbs the columbia broadcasting system