First of all, if you’re not familiar with what a garden path sentence is, go read the Wikipedia article on them.

Now that that’s out of the way… this was an actual headline in today’s issue of USA Today (though interestingly, it was reworded in the web version), of which I’ve reproduced the spacing exactly as it appeared in the paper:

Obama’s ad
buys dwarf
TV presence
of McCain

I had to read that two or three times before I realized it had nothing to do with little people starring in Obama ads.

Now that the entirety of Google’s Android phone OS has finally been released under the Apache license, I have modified the Droid Sans Mono font so as to include a more easily distinguishable zero, for the benefit of my fellow programmers. I thought it was a great-looking font for the most part, but the vague distinction between 0 and O simply wasn’t good for peering through long listings of program code.

(Despite the Ascender copyright notices contained within the font files, they are indeed now licensed under the Apache license; check out the Git repository if proof is necessary. I have left the Ascender copyright in the modified font file, in keeping with the appropriate sections of the Apache license.)

So here is the modified font, which I have named “Code Sans Mono Z”. I had originally named it “Droid Sans Mono Z”, but there were potential trademark issues with my using the Droid name, hence the change.

Code Sans Mono Z