I recently posted on how to make a wallet-sized version of the Ontario COVID vaccination certificate, but my original post contained incorrect code and so did not produce valid QR codes.
This has now been fixed and the original post now contains the correct code to do the work.
Shame on me for posting improperly-tested code.
The province of Ontario is now issuing COVID vaccinations certificates with QR codes on them, which you can carry with you to obtain admission to various public gathering places. You can also show the certificate on your phone, but having it on paper is useful in various circumstances:
Unfortunately, none of the sharp minds at our provincial government have realized that if someone wants to carry around a paper certificate, it would be much easier if it were wallet-sized rather than a full letter-size sheet of paper. Not to mention that the QR code is placed point blank on a fold in the paper, likely making the code unreadable, for pretty much any normal way of folding the paper.
I have made a wallet-sized version (3.56×2.24″ or 9.05×5.69cm) of my certificate. The front contains all the information of the original certificate except the QR code, with piles of white space removed, and the QR code is on the back. The actual text on the front is half the size of the original text and is still easily readable, and the QR code is about the same size as it would appear on the screen of a phone. All that is missing is the “page 1 of 2” annotation and, of course, page 2 which contains no useful information whatsoever.
Since we have 3 in our family, I decided to automate the slicing and dicing operation that generates the front and back images. I am using an image-processing tool called ImageMagick to do this, along with the following script that contains all the slicing operations.
-units PixelsPerInch ( +clone -crop 1419x1419+536+1828 -threshold 50% -resize 2425x2425 -gravity center -extent 4274x2688 -density 1200x1200 -write back.png ) -delete 1 -gravity NorthWest ( +clone -crop +0+6270 -repage +0+6120 ) -flatten ( +clone -crop +0+5875 -repage +0+5800 ) -flatten ( +clone -crop +0+5500 -repage +0+4625 ) -flatten ( +clone -crop +0+4200 -repage +0+4075 ) -flatten ( +clone -crop +0+3680 -repage +0+3630 ) -flatten ( +clone -crop +0+3580 -repage +0+3530 ) -flatten ( +clone -crop +0+3380 -repage +0+1540 ) -flatten ( +clone -crop +0+660 -repage +0+575 ) -flatten ( +clone -crop +0+430 -repage +0+345 ) -flatten ( +clone -crop +0+288 -repage +0+0 ) -flatten ( +clone -crop +4785+0 -repage +4660+0 ) -flatten ( +clone -crop +460+0 -repage +335+0 ) -flatten ( +clone -crop +288+0 -repage +0+0 ) -flatten -crop 4274x2688+0+0 +repage -density 1200x1200 -write front.png
I’m not claiming this is the most efficient script to do this; in particular, cutting out all the slices and flattening them all at once would likely be faster than doing a cut-and-flatten for each strip to slice away.
To make a wallet card, the steps are as follows:
magick imageFile -script scriptFile
where magick is the name of the command installed with ImageMagick, imageFile is the name of the image saved in step 4, and scriptfile is the name of the script file saved in step 2.
That leaves a bunch of details for you to figure out, like how you export an image from your PDF viewer, making sure the ‘magick’ command is in your command search path, figuring how this all maps to a Unix or Mac system (I was using Windows), doing this all in a separate new folder to make cleaning up easy, etc…
This original script I posted here didn’t work in general because the directives in the script were made to work only for 97×97 codes (what I found in my own certificate) but not all the QR codes are 97×97 bits. I have found that my daughter’s code is 93×93, and although my wife’s is 97×97 my phone’s QR code reader couldn’t scan it at all. The latter was an unrelated problem having to do with the resize operation I was using trying to do smoothing as it worked, leading to some pixels in the resize code being wrong.
But the script as posted above now works on 3 out of 3 certificates that it has been tested on.
Last night I was watching Terry Gilliam’s 1995 movie 12 Monkeys and in one scene I noticed one of my presses in the background. Well, of course not actually my press, but the same model.
During the first scene inside the revolutionaries’ shop, in the background you can see a Challenge MA-15 (or perhaps a similar model) proof press, with its factory speckle-green paint job. I think it would have been a long slog using that to print their propaganda leaflets! Perhaps in the story background the location had been a print shop that closed down before this group decided to use it, and some of the printing equipment was still there, particularly the “obsolete” letterpress stuff that the print shop would not have been able to sell off.
After skipping a year due to COVID-19, the Howard Iron Works Print Expo returns this year in virtual form.
They will have events and workshops live-streamed on the weekend of October 1st and 2nd, all hosted at the Howard Iron Works Printing Museum in Oakville, Ontario.
The events include:
Everything is free but you must reserve your spot for each live stream.
For more details and to book your spot(s), please visit the museum’s website.
We’ve just updated our catalogue. A few typos were fixed, but the main changes are that we are discontinuing our fax number, and there are a few price increases:
We have first cut cotton linters pulp in stock again, but the price has increased to $12.00 per kilogram. Second cut cotton linters pulp has also increased to $12.00/kg. Our usual quantity discounts still apply.
The conical stainless steel strainers have also increased in price to $60.00 for the small (8 inch) and $95.00 for the large (12 inch).
You can download our updated catalogue from the usual places: Our home page and the Getting Our Catalogue page. You may have to Refresh these in your browser to get the latest catalogue links.
We just came home from an overnight trip to Niagara Falls. The Falls and river gorge are breathtaking sights in themselves, but you eventually tire of them and start looking for other activities. This weekend was also particularly hot, and there was a lot of walking, so the things we often found ourselves seeking were shade, air conditioning, and a place to sit.
In this vein the first thing I would recommend is getting a day pass for the WeGo bus ($9 for an adult good for 24 hours from first use). In addition to saving on a lot of walking this fulfills both the air conditioning and (usually) place-to-sit requirements. Just don’t wait too long to purchase your passes: we found that after 5pm the Niagara Parks kiosks closed, making it harder to find a place to purchase the passes. Apparently many of the hotels sell them, but we purchased ours at the Secret Garden Gift Shop just a little off the main drag. Parking is expensive ($10/hour, max $30/day, no in/out privileges at the lots run by Niagara Parks) so once you’re parked you want to make a full day of it. Other than walking and the bus you can also rent bicycles, scooters, and three-wheel vehicles from various places (but then you have to park these somewhere too!).
The main place for tourist attractions is Clifton Hill, a two-block-long road which runs from Victoria Avenue down to the Niagara Parkway, pretty much just opposite the American Falls. This street is very busy, and is packed with restaurants, hotels, and carnival-like attractions. Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, we found that most of these attractions felt overpriced, if you consider the cost of admission and the amount of time it takes to visit. The restaurants also seemed expensive for just a quick meal; there was a Wendy’s but we had eaten Wendy’s on the trip down the day before.
We ended up finding places away from Clifton Hill to eat: Friday dinner at Phở Ginger in Niagara Falls on Victoria Avenue just half a block from Clifton Hill, Saturday breakfast at a regular Tim Horton’s at the corner of Murray and Stanley streets, Saturday lunch at Big Hungry Moose food court on the Niagara Parkway just on the north edge of town, and a cooling ice cream break at Reg’s Candy Kitchen along the Parkway under the Rainbow Bridge Canada Customs plaza, where Reg has been making fudge and other candies for decades (Reg, still there stirring his kettle of fudge, told us how long but I forget now).
The attractions that we went to (other than the Falls themselves, of course), generally in descending order by enjoyment and perceived value-for-money, were:
There are combination passes for some of these which can save a bit of money, but you really have to know ahead of time what you might want to visit if you buy one of these. If you don’t use all the attractions the pass is good for you’re pretty much better off buying admission to the individual attractions.
One attraction that we did not visit but I think we should have is the Niagara Parks Power Station, one of the many hydro-electric generating stations in area, which no longer generates power but has just this summer been opened as a sort of museum. This plant was built in 1905 as the first major development of electrical generation on the Canadian side of the Niagara River, and still contains all of the now disused machinery. The building itself reflects the grand architectural style of the day and so adds to the interest.
This was one of the first attractions that we looked into, and unfortunately I balked at the admission cost ($20 per person), but now that I’m more familiar with what most of the other attractions cost, that doesn’t seem so expensive.
Yesterday I was at the Mackenzie Printery and Newspaper Museum in Queenston Ontario. The museum is not open to the public right now, but members still meet there to work on organizing and cataloguing the collection, and I was in the area so I dropped in.
One item I saw there turned out to be a mould for duplicating a piece of type. This would be used by letterpress shops in a pinch when they are short a letter or two from a font, or need an extra copy of some dingbat.
The general idea is that the type to be duplicated is placed in the mould, then molten type metal is poured in to form a cast of the face of the type, which will act as a temporary matrix. The original type is removed, then the matrix is reinserted into the mould, and more molten type metal is added as one would cast type with a hand mould.
The quality of the duplicated type is not so great because there isn’t any pressure to force the molten metal into fine details—you can’t even do the “jerk” one does with a regular handmould to try to force the metal into the details. As a result thin strokes and fine serifs end up thinner than they should.
Despite the poor quality, it is better than no type at all. I would expect than once the shop is done with the forme and is dissing the type, these duplicates would immediately go to the hellbox rather than get mixed in with the good type.
The mould closed up around a piece of type, ready for casting the temporary matrix.
In this particular duplicating mould, two levers adjust to the height and width of the type, up to about 2 inches square, and a couple of screws can lock the mould to that setting. The unit is hinged to flip the mould to cast the actual copy of the type, and another handle operates a blade that cuts off the casting gate. The base has two holes to accept flat-head screws to attach it to a workbench; you could use it unmounted but attaching it to a bench would make the levers, especially the gate-cutter, easier to operate.
The mould flipped into its type-casting position. This shows the mouth where the metal would be poured and the lever and blade that cuts off the gate after the metal has hardened.
This mould has a bit of rust and a lot of dust so it needs a good cleaning and lubrication to make it workable again.
One aspect that I’m not sure about is what holds the temporary matrix from sliding out when the mould is inverted to cast the type. It is possible that the cavity where the matrix is cast has some groove or ledge that I didn’t see which would retain the matrix, or perhaps the handles and levers allow enough pressure to retain the matrix by friction alone. The fact that it does not have to withstand any significant pressure probably helps a lot.
This particular device only has a bit of labeling on it: “PATENTED made in germany [sic]” and “3288” (likely a serial number). If anyone has any more information on this particular device, please tell me and I can pass it on back to the Museum.
Update:
Patrick Goosens has pointed out that this is called a Typofix, and David MacMillan’s website has some information on it, including a somewhat messy scan of the instruction sheet. It is used pretty much as I surmised. There are apparently some sort of locating features to keep the matrix properly positioned. Both the type to be duplicated and the resulting matrix must be coated with soot so they come clean from the metal cast against them.
I have my 12-point Binny Old Style diecase set up, so last Saturday, I tried my first run with my laptop controlling my Monotype Composition Caster.
The text is a little note to include when I ship type across the border, attempting to discourage customs inspectors from unwrapping and pi-ing the type. Up until now this has been an MS Word document, from which I copied and pasted the main text into a new document to feed to Bill Welliver’s CompCAT software. So, no typos.
The casting job seemed to run well, although some of the type has burrs or fins on the body. The low em-quads have a fin up from the trailing edge, indicating the the upper mould blade is not staying closed tight against the mould crossblock. I guess it is time to take the mould apart and clean it.
I used some carbon paper to take a proof without having to wash ink off the type:
Although the input file had no typos, the words “clear” and “neatly” cast as “llear” and “eeatly” respectively. So letters that should have cast from positions J4 and K8 cast from J1 and K4 instead, both being the exact positions of the previously-cast letters.
One possibility is that some of the front airpins are slow to drop, so the 1 and 4 pins stayed up for an extra casting cycle. This would be more plausible if it were the same pin in both cases, but it seems very unlikely that there should be two sticky pins and that they both happened to stick when the next letter to cast was in the same column (J or K), and nowhere else in the job. Note that in each case the desired pin is a higher number than the (sticky) one. This would not be a valid explanation if the caster had cast “cc” instead of “lc” (J4 then J1 in the reversed casting order) because the 4 pin sticking up would have been overridden by the smaller-numbered 1 pin.
Another possibility is that the computer is occasionally failing to send a new selection code to the interface, so the same letter is cast twice in a row. The fact that the correct and cast letters happen to be in the same column would then be just coincidence. Given that the diecase layout is designed to keep the common letters close together, that is not a particularly unlikely coincidence. I’ve also noticed hints of communication problems when the air compressor starts up, and those two errors are roughly one compressor cycle apart.
I’m feeling that my measurement of plausibility here may be a bit skewed: On the one hand I appear to be finding it implausible that the two errors should happen to occur when the two letters involved happen to be in the same column, yet on the other hand I’m happy to treat that as just a coincidence. I should probably just cast the job a few more times to better qualify when the errors occur.
The USB protocol for writing to the device does not include any sort of verification: The host computer just sends the data and the device is expected to listen for it. It looks like I will have to modify the software to read back the device status to ensure that the written data was received, and if not, to send it again. At first I will make the software signal an error when this happens rather than resending, so I can verify that this is indeed the source of the problem. Fixing intermittent problems is always so much fun…
I previously posted about some Monotype diecase combs which were too long for any diecases that could be used on the Composition Caster. I did not think they were for the newer Monomatic caster because I thought the diecases for this machine were divided into four 9×9 blocks of cellular matrices.
After looking through the poor quality copy I have to the Monomatic II parts manual, I found that this caster supported both the divided diecases and also ones holding a single 18×18 grid of matrices.
Parts diagram for the undivided diecase
Parts diagram for the divided diecase
It is still a bit of a mystery to me how the caster can handle both styles of diecase, since in the divided diecase, half the matrices are (what appears to be) an entire column (0.2″) displaced from their positions in the undivided diecase. I think the resolution of the quandary lies in the method used by the Monomatic to select the diecase column:
The Composition Caster uses 14 air channels to select one of 15 columns in the original style diecase. If no air channels are selected, the diecase positions by default to column O. Any single air channel, when selected, positions the diecase to the corresponding column A through N. If multiple channels are selected the diecase positions to the one closest to the A position. More advanced features of the caster (including the 17-column diecase) use combinations of these air channels to control them.
The Monomatic uses 9 air channels to select one of 18 positions. Of those, 8 select one of 9 positions in a manner similar to the composition caster: No channels selects the highest position, and the 8 channels individually select the next 8 positions. The last air channel acts as a shift, putting a spacer in the mechanism to move the diecase by 9 positions, thus allowing access to a total of 18 positions.
Not relevant to this particular topic, but the same mechanism (8 individual selector channels, default to a 9th position, with a shift) is used for row selection and set-size wedge positioning. These 3 sets of 9 air channels, plus a channel to force a low quad, along with the original S, .0075, and .0007 channels make up 31 channels, and the Monomatic uses exactly the same paper tower to read the ribbon as the composition caster does.
The difference between the divided and undivided diecases could be accommodated by changing out the column-selection spacer that is activated by the shift mechanism.
I have a Monotype diecase for Lanston 12-point #21EFG Binny Old Style which includes most French accents, but was missing question and exclamations marks in both roman and italic, as well as the small cap Z.
I was quite pleased to find recently, in a box marked “Symbols and Ornaments/Misc Comp Mats”, the missing matrices. Well, most of them; the roman exclamation mark is actually Lanston #272 Caslon Old Style, but close enough.
The matcase and the dusty stash of matrices.
I also wanted to cast a dingbat (a 5-point star) as part of my first computer-controlled casting job. This came from a separate box of symbol matrices I have. This box is unfortunately full so it can’t take the symbol matrices from the somewhat decrepit cardboard box in the photo.
The matrices to put into the diecase
I opened up the diecase, cleaned out some type metal that had found its way between the matrices, and put in the missing matrices. The star replaced a plus sign, the two exclamation marks replaced some filler matrices that were just there to take up the positions, and the small-cap Z and question marks replaced a dash, a period, and an italic ô in the 8-unit row. The matrices I removed were returned to the box. If I had Unit Shift on my caster I could have moved the ô to the next row instead of taking it out.
The diecase opened up, with the matrices replaced, and the outgoing ones loose on the table.
I also replaced three of the combs in the diecase, because the combs already there must have had burrs on their ends. They would not slide smoothly into their grooves in the diecase. This was when I discovered a set of strange 18-position combs in my parts collection.
After finishing my casting job I will be putting the plus sign back and returning the star symbol to the wooden box of symbol matrices.