Is the official name of the language "Julia" or "julia"?

[Douglas Bates]

On julialang.org the name is "julia" in the title/icon but "Julia" in the text.  I am writing a paper on some computational methods and want to make sure I have the capitalization of the name correct.  I presume "Julia" is the preferred form.

[Stefan Karpinski]

I've been using "Julia" capitalized to refer to the language and "julia" to refer to the program that implements the language. So I guess I'm voting that the official name of the language is "Julia" – so capitalized.

[R. Michael Weylandt]

Not unlike the 'only perl can parse Perl' distinction?

MW

[Stefan Karpinski]

Yes, precisely. Except that Julia is quite parseable by others than julia.

[Viral Shah]

I have been doing the same - using Julia to refer to the language, and julia to refer to the program/system. For purposes of publications and writing, I usually just use "Julia" consistently.

Or perhaps we should have a TeX macro. :-)

-viral

[Rahul Dave]

All of this reminds me of the old Kathleen Turner movie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_and_Julia

:-)

-- 

Rahul Dave

Sent with Sparrow

[Tomas Lycken]

Maybe something like this? =)

\documentclass{article}

\newcommand\Julia{Jul${\mathrm{\i}}\dot{\ddot{}}$a}

\begin{document}

\Julia

\end{document}

Yes, I had help...

[Tomas Lycken]

As the answers to my tex.stackexchange.com question evolved, I've decided it would be nice to put this in a LaTeX package for myself - but it would be a shame not to share it with the world =)

However, before I upload it to CTAN and submit it to TeX Live, I'd like to get some feedback on the following:

• Is the output from the proposed macro good enough to become the "official" way to write Julia in LaTeX? If not, what should change?
• Is there a copyright license on the logo itself that needs to be considered for releasing this code as a package? It is, at least, a derivative work of the logo at julialang.org. I've read through the licensing documents for Julia that I could find, but they are all focused on the code and libraries, so it didn't help me much.

I'm grateful for all and any comments!

// Tomas

[Stefan Karpinski]

It's kind of amazing that this can be done in LaTeX, but I guess almost anything can, right? For the record, I made the Julia logo – using Keynote (clearly, I am a design pro). So I guess I own the copyright. It should probably go under some kind of creative commons license, but I'm not sure what. Obviously, I don't at all mind that you're recreating the logo in LaTeX – it's really cool. The only potential concern is that maybe copyright needs to be enforced like trademark in order to be retained? That doesn't seem to be the way copyright actually works, but who knows. Regarding the LaTeX logo itself, the font is a bit off and the kerning at larger sizes looks a bit wide, but otherwise it looks pretty good, especially embedded in normal text. We should probably pay a real designer to do a better version of the logo based on my Keynote version.

[Tomas Lycken]

I'm no lawyer, but my gut feeling is that trademarks and copyrights are sort of orthogonal concepts - it's OK to use a corporate logo when talking about that company, but it's not OK to use it to impersonate that company, or to create a logo for your own business that is too similar to a registered trademark. If this assumption is correct, registering the Julia logo as a trademark would ensure the integrity of the brand, while still allowing spin-offs (like this LaTeX-package) and other derivative works (desktop artwork, anyone?). I have no idea if the popular open licenses (I think LPPL and CC are most relevant in this specific case) have a problem with trademarks, though.

While pondering if and how to release the LaTeX code, I'd be happy to try to improve it =) What font did you use for the original logo? Is it freely available?

[Pierre-Yves Gérardy]

On Saturday, May 11, 2013 9:21:10 PM UTC+2, Stefan Karpinski wrote:

It should probably go under some kind of creative commons license, but I'm not sure what.

I was about to recommend CC By(?) SA, ie with attribution(?), share-alike; then I went to see how CC itself handles their logos and trademarks.

http://creativecommons.org/policies, http://creativecommons.org/about/downloads

tl;dr, not CC, at all. They have strict restrictions on how they can be used.

-- Pierre-Yves

[Patrick O'Leary]

Regarding trademarks, Mozilla's experience may be instructive: http://lwn.net/Articles/546678/

[Tomas Lycken]

Interesting reading indeed.

I guess I won't post any LaTeX code to CTAN until the Julia project has its own law firm... :P

// T

[Stefan Karpinski]

The font situation is a bit odd. The name of the font is called Sinhala MN Bold. It has shipped with OS X since Lion and provides glyphs for the Sinhalese language. The characters used in this text, however, are plain old ASCII and clearly not in Sinhalese. I have no idea what the "fallback font" used in Sinhala MN Bold is, although it is the same as used on many other non-english fonts on OS X. I tried to dig into it, but can't figure it out. The sharply slanted letter tops are very distinctive and should be easy to identify if someone happens to know the original font. I chose this style by just trying various fonts available on my system and seeing what looked good. This one just seemed to work.

Regarding licensing of the Sinhala MN Bold font, it's pretty clear that all documents created using fonts distributed with OS X may be used without any additional licensing, so this is fine (if we wanted to distributed or modify the font itself, that would be a different story).

[Patrick O'Leary]

You could get a somewhat larger type sample without the decorative dots, and submit it to the WhatTheFont service. There aren't enough letters in the logo to identify it as-is (or to manually identify it with Identifont).

[Waldir Pimenta]

I tried both anyway. WhatTheFont recognized the letters easily, but only matched 3 fonts, none of which were particularly similar to the image. I'm not sure more characters would help (but yeah, if the dots are decorative and not following the original shapes, that would harm the results). In Identifont, I had to skip a ton of questions to get the narrow set that corresponds to the letters in "julia". But in the end, I did have enough answers for the system to tell me that none of the fonts on its database match exactly. I also tried another service, quite similar to WhatTheFont: WhatFontIs.com. It did return more results (100 of them, actually), several of them quite close, but none really nailing it.

[Patrick O'Leary]

I'm sorry I put you through that--I had already tried to do both of these things. I realize that wasn't clear, but at least the result is reproducible!

[Jameson Nash]

I believe that the name of the font you are looking for is "Sinhala MN Bold". It is a bit strange, but if you look closely, you will notice that it includes glyphs for both Latin and Sinhala. That said, it doesn't preclude the possibility that some other font was embedded in there for Latin. I tried the attached image on WhatTheFont without success.

The fallback font for mac is has been Lucida Grande according to wikipedia and some personal experience.

[Stefan Karpinski]

The same letters are used for the Latin characters in various other "MN Bold" fonts on OS X: Bangla, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Malayalam, Mayanmar, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, and Telugu – all designed by one Muthu Nedumaran, some copyright him, some copyright "Murasu Systems Sdn. Bhd. Malaysia." So it's pretty clear that those particular letter shapes are not actually Sinhala MN Bold, but some other font that's being used for the Latin characters in all of these fonts. The real question is what that mystery font is.

[Waldir Pimenta]

Well, we could contact Muthu directly :) His email seems to be mu...@murasu.com, according to this document: http://tamilnation.co/digital/tamilnet02/06MUTHU.pdf

Note: murasu.com seems to be in maintenance mode. The last (non-maintenance) archived versions seem to be from 2009-10-27 and 2011-10-07.

[Tomas Lycken]

Regarding trademarks and logos for opensource projects, there seems to be some good reading at opensource.org:

http://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines
http://opensource.org/logo-usage-guidelines

I stumbled over them when looking for other stuff, so I haven't had time to read through them, but if I post them here at least I've saved them somewhere. And chances are someone else may have the time ;)

// Tomas

[cormu...@mac.com]

About that font:

Twitter discussion with Muthu Nedumaran:
https://twitter.com/typographica/status/572304422610452480

FontsInUse entry:
http://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/38527/mn-latin

[Stefan Karpinski]

Thanks for the additional info!

[cormu...@mac.com]

The only remaining question is the significance of the four colored circles in the logo... :) Where's a symbologist when you need one?