David Small’s thesis was super cool. I’d never thought about the crazy linear algebra and matrix multiplications required to distort font pixels at such a granular level. It was fascinating to see his extremely technical and math intensive process of bringing responsive text environments to life. Clearly, this was something he was passionate about, and I can’t even begin to imagine all of the road blocks he faced (math equations for distortion, debugging on the parallel connection machine, designing a modular interface, etc). I don’t even like using the watercolor brush on Notability, but after reading this paper, I have a newfound appreciation for the math that went into developing the tool. It was crazy to think that translucency and layers hadn’t been considered also at the time of Small’s thesis; this was definitely cutting edge work. His head was also in the right place in terms of where creative tools needed to go. He predicted that real time text addition and layers would be needed in the future. However, I was left fuzzy on what he meant by dyanmic linking. I wasn’t sure how it related to the pixel-by-pixel manipulations of type (quoted description below).

“Dynamic linking of comments and annotations to the text is an important way to expand the generality of the system. Although footnotes currently perform some of the functions associated with hypertext, a more robust and general system needs to be developed. It should be able to handle an arbitrary number of layers and types of links.”