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To add to parent poster: if you're working in X, the xwrits package is great for this.

On a more serious note, in my experience it does help to exercise those muscles a bit. You can do it with your own weight. Do a few press ups and sit ups while watching TV. If you don't have the discipline for that, install a break reminder. When it pops up, put your hands flat on the desk and press real hard for about a minute.

I run Linux and use XWrits as follows:

xwrits typetime=15 breaktime=1 canceltime=1

They should have used the Open Profanity License instead!

- shadowmatter

• Take breaks
• Get Excercise

I'm a righty, but I switched to a left-handed mouse about five years ago after a one-week motorcycle trip around the Great Lakes (intense vibration) followed by a one-week click-fest through the original Fallout RPG.

Because I make my living as a computer geek, I was surprised and dismayed to find just how messed up my right wrist was after that boneheaded combination of events. I tentatively switched over to using the mouse left-handed, meaning to do it temporarily, but discovered that within a week I was pretty comfortable, and within two weeks I had fully adjusted.

Five years later I'm still using it left-handed, which seems to mess up both righties and lefties when they try to use my workstation. I used to use xwrits to remind me to take regular mouse breaks so I don't (&%# up this wrist too, but I've been bad lately.

I've thought about a two-mouse system, but editing code and writing tech docs really lends itself to a keyboard. If I was an artist maybe a two-mouse system would let me switch brushes and colours midstroke, but I'm no artist. Just a recently minted ambidextrous person. I suppose if I were in Russia, I could say that the mouse manipulated ME...

If I didn't spend 10 minutes an hour meandering arround the office I would probably go insane.

I am not sure why this is funny. It really is a good idea with typing breaks, and of course you can do other work while not typing.

The tool Xwrits may be of use for people interested in this item but not prepared for the entire GNOME upgrade shebang. It must be cool, JWZ uses it (and so do I).

My solution to wrist pain has been to use a break reminder program like xwrits to remind me to take a 5 minute break for every hour of computer use. I would use those five minutes to get out of my chair and walk around for a while, so not only was I resting my hands, but my whole body as well.

It's also a good idea to look out the window at something distant while taking your breaks, you can avoid eye strain by not focusing on something 18 inches from your head all the time.

JWZ has some good advice about this stuff on his site which I found very useful.

...meeting the "non-geek" challenge is harder. Most OSS I use on Windows is command-line. I've got to have InfoZIP's CLI zip utilities or my Windows box just isn't complete. Note, they have a GUI client called "Wize" or something like that, but unless it's improved a lot within the past few months I can't recommend it. Of course gzip and bzip2 or important too, but that's even more geeky than the CLI zip.

Then of course there is Gifsicle for making animated GIFs. I like it so much I'm willing to hold my nose on the GPL.

I wouldn't be afraid to recommend Apache for Windows at this point either. I actually found it *easier* to deal with than any "personal webserver" put out by MSFT. Maybe that's just me.

Of course, these are all CLI (or non-gui config for Apache). If you are serious about doing a commercial OSS for Windows CD, you need to include a 90-10 tutorial for your CLI software. By this, I mean giving the users examples that show the 10% of CLI options that provide 90% of the functionality. Gifsicle has at least 15 options (probably more), and I think I used about 3 of them to produce some killer animated GIFs.

Then of course there are the browser, office tools, GIMP etc. that others have suggested. However, none of that GUI OSS has lasted long on my machine. ABIword is the exception. I think I put it to actual use *once* to bang out a simple letter for my Dad. Nothing against ABIword; it's just that for some strange reason no GUI OSS has really worked its way into my heart.

The parent post is moronic and uninformed, as are the moderators who modded it up.
Designing fonts is not as difficult as he makes it out to be, and it certainly can be learned - as can anything in life.
There are hundreds (if not thousands) of good artists out there that are more than capable of learning how to design a font who are also familiar with programming.
There are also a few open source font designing utilities.
t1utils is a good Type 1 designing tool.
It is a commandline font compiler/decompiler that uses an ascii file to define the postscript font outlines of each character directly.

Another good thing to do is to use some program like xrwits. It's a keyboard timer that tells you to take a break every (whatever you set it to) minutes. You can delay the break if you are in the middle of something, but it gets progressively more annoying. Of course it's entirely voluntary and you can kill it easily, but if you use it well it helps. I originally saw this recommended here.

Something that helped me personally was taking a yoga class - and probably any system of regular stretching that involves the wrists will have the same effect. Whatever gripes one may have about the pseudo-mysticism of things like yoga, it made a really noticable difference in the amount of pain I felt in everyday typing that semester (ah if only I could work up the self discipline to keep doing it regularly).

(Yes, there's an intentional typo in the name.)

The xwrits tool occasionally pops up reminders to stop typing and do your writs exercises. And if you ignore it, it makes rude gestures at you. Debian users can just apt-get the xwrits package, and there's source and RPMs and stuff on the project page.

It definitely helped me. My wrists rarely hurt anymore (but I should keep doing the exercises anyway).

glad to hear you're recovering. If you're using X11, you might want to take a look at xwrits (nope, not a typo). helps you remember via a silly automated popup to take your breaks (really really configurable too).

The pain around my knuckles and center of the top part of my hand got bad enough that I had to have an intern read/write e-mails for me at work. And rather then being a senior systems admin, I did staff training for various technical topics. Yippy. I took two weeks off of typing, and did a lot of research. This is what I ended up doing:

1) Kinesis Contour Keyboard . I was highly skeptical of this keyboard, being $250... but my hand pains were enough that I would try anything. I got it for home, the one with dual-dvorak/qwerty caps. I now swear by this keyboard so much that I would rather give up my Athlon and go back to a 486/33 if it was the only way to keep this keyboard. I then had work buy me one. It's hard to learn a new keyboard if it changes depending on where you are :) The primary advantage of this keyboard is no matter what keys you hit, your hands never move. Things that don't move, don't get stressed. I've also got some good photos of it's inards and some closeups.

2) Dvorak Keyboard Layout . I took the dive when I bought my Kinesis and immediately began learning Dvorak. Having my keyboard labeled with dual-dvorak/qwerty keys helped me a lot. Un-learning 12 years of QWERTY was by no means easy, but worth it. It was very rough to learn (took about 3 weeks to get back to normal speed), but because your fingers don't have to move as much for english words, my fingers are under a lot less stress. Doesn't help much with perl though, but Ruby's nicer syntax means my hands contort less anyways. Oh, you don't lose your qwerty skills. Whenever I type on a normal keyboard, my hand things qwerty. It associated Dvorak with the Kinesis keyboard.

3) Contour Systems Perfit Mouse . This was almost as important as the keyboard. It amazed me what a difference this made. These mice are custom to your hands. I got two 3-button mice for 7-inch hands, one lefty and one righty. I use the left handed mouse at home (my natural hand), and the right handed at work. It took some training on my right hand, but the balance makes it much less hurtful. I still get pains going to Microsoft mice or trackballs. I can't stress how excellently designed these are for your hands. Rather then pushing the end of your finger to click, you apply a very light pressure in the middle of your fingers. Less movement is less stress is less pain.

4) xwrits . This is software to remind you to take keyboard breaks. You can install it straight from /usr/ports/deskutils/xwrits in FreeBSD. This is the .xsession command line I use:

xwrits typetime=50 +finger=japanese +clock +mouse +beep +breakclock +multiply +top &

I'm going to have to set it so that locks me out of my workstation soon. I often will type "killall xwrits". Anyways, that's what I ended up doing for my situation. I can now type again quite happily, though I still get pains on normal qwerty keyboards like the one I'm on ATM at a friends house. Hand damage really sucks, I miss being able to use laptops without pain. Now I have to drag this Kinesis around.

IF YOU FEEL PAIN - STOP - TAKE BREAKS - FIX YOUR SITUATION! SEE A DOCTOR!. I cannot stress this enough. Not fixing this earlier has cost me.

Long answer: no, unless there are tools for converting TeX/METAFONT fonts to Adobe Type 1 (not merely PostScript; Type 1 is a specially structured subset of PS) or TrueType. I haven't heard of any. It's more likely that there exist tools to make a set of bitmap (BDF/PCF) fonts from a METAFONT font, but that's not quite the same.

I think you're missing the point. For X screen fonts, you don't want Type 1 PostScript or TrueType fonts, you want well-crafted bitmaps that have been designed for screen display. I don't know about your machine, but on my system, Type 1 and TrueType fonts (other than Microsoft's Web fonts, which were specifically designed for screen display) look awful. Only the bitmap fonts (and Microsoft Web fonts) are readable and acceptable for everyday use. I leave PostScript fonts to gv.

The mf program translates METAFONT format (MF) source files into GF (font raster) and TFM (TeX Font Metrics) files; GF files must be processed by gftopk to produce PK (packed font raster) files. xmbdfed, however, can import PK or GF font files and produce BDF files.

For a neat example of PK fonts in use as screen fonts, check out TeXmacs, which gives you a really nice looking WYSIWYG display (better than anything else I've ever seen running under X). TeXmacs uses fairly large font sizes, however; I'm not sure if you can get legible PK fonts at smaller sizes (for, say, a terminal window).

(By the way, the Type 1 Utils are not GPLed, but are freely available for use or modification (provided you maintain the existing copyright notices), and can be found on Eddie Kohler's Web site. If you want Debian packages, an ancient (pre-Eddie) version is available from the main archives (t1utils), with the current version (t1utils-ek) available from this site (as source, unless you have a PowerPC machine).)

Take breaks!

I've messed with a bunch of ergo-devices, but the thing that really, really helped was xwrits. It is designed to force you to take breaks every N minutes, and it is heavily customizable for maximum annoyance until you take your break. I have mine set to make me stop every 45 minutes for 5 minutes. If I ignore my break for five or more minutes, it starts flipping me off (and, yes, you can set your culture preference for the "flipoff" hand gesture).

-Mike

This can't really be called incompetence, as anyone capable of the lengths necessary to do this probably is capable of pretty much anything web-related. This here was a case of bad web design philosophy. The people who do this are highly-educated, technically-skilled, not-incompetent, fucking idiots.

Xwrits is a great utility to enforce typing breaks. I take 5 mins every 35 minutes. I also use a DataHand keyboard, do various stretching exercises and try to eat healthy and I'm doing much better than I did a year ago!