TM★

Anchored figures lab

The typesetter room's mirror image. There, the picture goes wherever you put it and the text flows around it. Here each figure is anchored to a character in the text plus an offset from the left edge — the text flows first, the figure hangs below its anchor's line, and the flow reflows around it. Figures place top-down in anchor order, since a higher figure moves a lower one's anchor but never the reverse. Drag a figure sideways to shift it; drag it vertically to re-anchor it in the prose.

fig 1 ⚓ ch 160 · 25% from right

The text you're reading isn't really text — not the way a browser means it. Every line here was measured, broken, and placed by a small typesetting engine running inside this page, one word-width at a time.

It exists because the web can't do this. CSS can push words to one side of a picture, but it cannot split a line around one — ask a browser for a magazine and it hands you a scroll. Drag the picture and watch the paragraphs pour themselves again. That's not a video. That's arithmetic.

I build things like this for a living, which is a strange sentence, because for a living I have also mapped mines in 3D, published machine learning that predicts injuries before they happen, taught courses for Google, Meta, and Microsoft, and run a working farm on software I wrote between harvests.

The pattern underneath is consistent: someone hands me a problem nobody has scoped — a mine that can't see its own trucks, a course that doesn't exist yet, a farm that can't sell its own vegetables — and I figure out what to build. Then I build it.

Sixteen years of that teaches you the shape of unsolved problems. They are almost never unsolved because they're hard. They're unsolved because they sit in the gap between two crafts, and everyone stands politely on their own side, waiting.

This page sits in the gap between typography and code. The last people who stood here in earnest worked at Adobe, a decade ago, and moved on. The hard part was solved by Donald Knuth in 1981 — someone just had to walk over and pick it up.

So this is a portfolio, technically. Mostly it's an argument: the interesting work lives between the fields, and I've made a career of walking into the space between them. Staring into a gap like that? Say hi at tylermorgan.me/contact

Either way — thanks for reading the columns. The pictures are still draggable.

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