Blossom in the morning

The conker's flowers are starting to expand and become visible now. I couldn't resist the picture today. I've corrected the perspective a little but it's as I remember it.

My Friday was very busy doing lots of things for different clients. I basically sent the day spinning plates switch from task to task all day. Though I ended up with some unplanned overtime for Saturday, it's better than working late on Friday and making an error because you're tired.

The one thing I had to fix was the font problem with the invoice that came to light at the end of Thursday and I mentioned in yesterday's blip. Basically the Helvetica font installed on the system doesn't have glyphs for central/eastern European languages in it, so they are substituted by a hash mark ("#"), which isn't very helpful.

Someone had already installed Arial on the system, so I thought I'd try that, as it's similar to Helvetica and being a bit more recent some versions have a good range of characters, but that was no better. So I assume it was an older version with only basic western European glyphs like the Helvetica.

So I selected IBM Plex Sans Semi-Condensed and gave that a try.  It's IBM's official font replacing Helvetica, so visually quite similar, but more modern. Importantly it's free and open-source so I can use it without a problem and it has been designed with a very large range of possible alphabets built-in, so it worked perfectly first time out. The condensed form is a little more compact that the standard, which is important as we're always asked to squeeze more onto forms than there is enough space, so that should help.

Overall a productive day, and no plate landed on the floor in pieces by the time it was time to walk the dog...