The file wanderings.pdf are the slides I used for my talk at the ConTeXt
meeting in Bassenge on 23 September 2011.  It is mostly made of scrap
material, so to speak, as I had absolutely no time to prepare anything
beforehand.  Hence, I gathered a few items I set aside a while ago
because I thought I might talk about them some time; and filled in the
blanks with whatever I could put my hands on, as well as the content of
my camera’s SD card.

As one can see, it consists mostly of one huge PDF page, prepared using
Hans’s s-pre-17.tex – which I just found out about the day before, on
the Eurostar coming from London.  The different parts are more or less
arranged in columns: the first one gives examples of bad typography I
stumbled across, mostly through my friend Laurence Grace, who features
in one of the photographs, drinking beer as he faces one of the
aforementioned samples: an outrageous typo on a rather visible sign seen
in a pub near Oxford Street; whence the saying: “Beer good; that bad”.
And, oh yes, he’s a retired typographer and had just made a deletion
mark on the offending character with his pen :-)

The second column shows various examples of a particular problem that
personally upsets me very much: how random the language codes look that
commercial companies use to label languages, when they have multilingual
signs on their product.  Very often, they choose codes that label the
countries instead of the languages, which is ridiculous because in no
part of the world can languages be uniquely identified to countries, nor
vice-versa.  And even then, the actual codes they use regularly are
random and inconsistent, being a mixture of ISO 3166 code elements,
international car plates codes, and sometimes completely made-up random
acronyms.  This display actually continues on the third column, that’s
concluded by a possible solution: don’t label anything, just set the
text in the different languages at hand.  This last example I literally
picked up on my way to the conference (on the Eurostar arriving in
Brussels, as it is): it is a small leaflet about health and safety
regulations on the train, and disturbingly, when I showed the image, the
audience felt it was normal that this particular item needed no language
tagging, as it gave out actual information; while the many examples I
showed earlier were only there, it was supposed, to conform to some
regulation.  Subtext: they contain no useful information at all.
Strange world we live in...

Anyway, the fourth and last column is about hyphenation, a sort of
specialty of mine, for good and for worse.

The pictures of the trash cans are there because I like the font of the
corporate Veolia logo.  Shot in Tallinn and Vecrīga, respectively.

Arthur, Bassenge-Boirs, Belgium, Région Wallonie, 23 September 2011