Sisyphus was the founder and first king of Ephyra (supposedly the original name of Corinth). King Sisyphus promoted navigation and commerce but was avaricious and deceitful. He also killed guests to his palace and travellers, a violation of xenia, which fell under Zeus' domain, thus angering the god. He took pleasure in these killings because they allowed him to maintain his iron-fisted rule. Sisyphus by Theo Koutz (2006; Z-code). IF Comp 2006: 39th place (tie) See: IFWiki. Emilian Kowalewski. Project Delta by Emilian Kowalewski (2008; MS-Windows). IF Comp 2008: 32nd place; See: IFDB, IFWiki. Trap Cave by Emilian Kowalewski (2009; Node-X; English and German). IF Comp 2009: 23rd place; See: IFDB, IFWiki. Cleopatra Kozlowski. 658.0e2f470 (658.0e2f470-1) Summary: A Modbus library for Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, QNX and Win32 (mingw-w64). The world is absurd “We lead a difficult life, not always managing to fit our actions to the vision we have of the world.” Albert Camus. Albert Camus’ death was the ultimate testament to the central philosophy of his life. Camus had spent New Year’s 1960 in the south of France, together with his family, and the family of his friend, Marcel Gallimard.

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When Apple announced their new file system, APFS, in June, I hustled to be in the front row of the WWDC presentation, questions with the presenters, and then the open Q&A session. I took a week to write up my notes which turned into as 12 page behemoth of a blog post — longer than my college thesis. Despite reassurances from the tweeps, I was sure that the blog post was an order of magnitude longer than the modern attention span. I was wrong; so wrong that Ars Technica wanted to republish the blog post. Never underestimate the interest in all things Apple.

In that piece I left one big thread dangling. Apple shipped APFS as a technology preview, but they left out access to one of the biggest new features: snapshots. Digging around I noticed that there was a curiously named new system call, “fs_snapshot”, but explicitly didn’t investigate: the post was already too long (I thought), I had spent enough time on it, and someone else (surely! surely?) would want to pull on that thread.

Slow News Day

Every so often I’d poke around for APFS news, but there was very little new. Last month folks discovered that APFS was coming to iOS sooner rather than later. But there wasn’t anything new to play with or any revelations on how APFS would work.

I would search for “APFS snapshots”, “fs_snapshot”, anything I could think of to see if anyone had figured out how to make snapshots work on APFS. Nothing.

A few weekends ago, I decided to yank on that thread myself.

Prometheus

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I started from the system call, wandered through Apple’s open source kernel, leaned heavily on DTrace, and eventually figured it out. Apple had shipped snapshots in APFS, they just hadn’t made it easy to get there. The folks at Ars were excited for a follow-up, and my investigation turned into this: “Testing out snapshots in Apple’s next-generation APFS file system.”

Snapshots were there; the APIs were laid bare; I was going to bring fire to all the Mac fans; John Siracusa and Andy Ihnatko would carry me on their shoulders down the streets of the Internet.

Sisyphus

On the eve that this new piece was about to run I was nervously scrolling through Twitter as I took the bus home from work. Now that I had invested the time to research and write-up APFS snapshots I didn’t want someone else beating me to the punch.

Then I found this and my heart dropped:

Slides from the “Storing our digital lives: Mac filesystems from MFS to APFS” session at MacTech Conference 2016: https://t.co/uJJuqLL8n9

— Rich Trouton (@rtrouton) November 17, 2016

Skim past the craziness of MFS and the hairball of HFS, and start digging through the APFS section. Slide 49, “APFS Snapshots” and there it is “apfs_snapshot” — not a tool that anyone laboriously reverse engineered, deciphering system calls and semi-published APIs — a tool shipped from Apple and included in macOS by default. F — .

Apple had secreted this utility away (along with some others) in /System/Library/Filesystems/apfs.fs/Contents/Resources/

What To Do?

The article that was initially about a glorious act of discovery had become an article about the reinvention of the wheel. Conversely, vanishingly few people would recognize this as rediscovery since the apfs_snapshot tool was so obscure (9 hits on Google!).

We toned down the already modest chest-thumping and published the article this morning to a pretty nice response so far. I might have happier as an FAKE NEWS Prometheus, blissfully unaware of the pre-existence of fire, but I would have been mortified when the inevitable commenter, one of the few who had used apfs_snapshot, crushed me with my own boulder.

This is one of those topics that just makes me feel like Sisyphus: I keep on pushing the boulder of truth back up the hill, and a zillion other folks just roll it back down again. The problem with this myth is that it’s almost true – except when the exact opposite is the case. I just read the popular wisdom on this topic again tonight, in an online column from another type foundry. Worse, it was written by an outstanding type designer who is also a great person. Oh well – at least I have a topic for tonight’s blog posting.

[update 12 May 2006: an esteemed colleague at “other type foundry” points out that some of the linked material, and a bit buried below from an asterisk in the main text, correctly clarifies the initial blanket advice. I still don’t get the need to give misleading advice up front, but at least it’s clear that they know the full truth, even if they present it oddly.]

What’s true is that using bold and italic styling on text can sometimes result in a faux (fake) bold or italic. If there is no style-linked bold or italic font, or that font is not installed, you’ll get a faux bold or italic, and it won’t look great, and it may print even worse. So the popular wisdom among graphic designers is that you should never do it, but always pick the bold or italic font directly off the font menu. Unfortunately, the popular wisdom is just plain wrong, for two main reasons.

First, most of the people giving this advice must not have spent much time on a Windows machine (or perhaps they assume that everybody who matters is on Mac OS). It’s true that most of Adobe’s applications allow you to directly pick any font off the font menu, even on Windows. However, 'normal' Windows applications such as Microsoft Office don’t allow direct access to bold and italic variants. You can select only the 'base font' of the style linked group, and you must apply bold or italic styles as needed. That’s just how Windows fonts work in most Windows applications, and folks who tell users they should only pick the bold or italic font directly off the font menu are betraying their platform bias by not realizing this is Mac-only advice.

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It gets worse when Mac users go to Windows and wonder where their fonts went, or Windows users don’t realize that those 'styles' are often fonts unto themselves. I wrote this section of our OpenType Readme to try to address the issue from those perspectives. It’s also covered in an Adobe Knowledgebase article from our tech support section.

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The second consideration is for folks on Mac OS making documents in 'normal' applications such as MS Office, which may need to go to Windows users who have 'the same' fonts. If the Mac users want their document fonts to map correctly on Windows, they must use the style links where appropriate. That is, if you can get to the real italic font by style link, you must do so. Otherwise the fonts won’t map correctly when the document goes to your colleague on a Windows machine.

Finally, if an application supports both style links and paragraph or character styles based on other styles, it can be handy to use a 'based on' style and use the bold or italic style link for emphasis. This allows the possibility that if you change the font of the underlying style, the style link can function with the new font without you having to redefine it as well.

That last point is a matter of personal preference and working style. But the first two are a matter of necessity. So here’s hoping a few more people do their homework before telling others that using bold or italic styling on text is 'always wrong.' Yes, it can be a problem for the unwary, but sometimes it’s a necessity – like for the millions of people running Microsoft Word on Windows.

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(Note: Please no comments about Mac superiority or descent into platform wars. I do think that it’s nicer to always be able to tell which fonts are really available to you. But gosh, in the grand scheme of things, there are a zillion more important things in choosing which computer platform you want to use.)