Re: RFC: Designing Logo of Pandoc

[allefeld <c_a-1KBjaw7Xf1+zQB+pC5nmwQ@public.gmane.org>]

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Hi,

I’m a long-time Pandoc user – thanks to jgm for this excellent tool! The 
possibility to have a Pandoc logo occurred to me recently, when I started 
to work on a Pandoc/PDF package for the Atom editor and needed an icon.

To be honest, I don’t really like the designs proposed so far. They seem 
too “invented” to me, the connection to Pandoc being only clear to people 
to whom it has been explained. I mean, “∀” to stand for “pan” is a cute 
idea if you know what a logical quantifier is, but only very few people 
will make this connection. And “Δ” to stand for “document” seems even more 
arbitrary to me. And the graphic design abilities of the people on the list 
appear to be limited. No offence!

Now, at the danger of opening me up to similar criticism, I thought of 
this: Use a symbol

   - which is already designed, so no need for graphic design talents, 
   - which is in Unicode, so that there are fonts that can be used for the 
   design,and 
   - which is connected to both Pandoc’s name and function (transforming a 
   sequence of paragraphs). 

One symbol that fulfills these criteria is the “Pilcrow Sign” (¶, U+00B6) 
indicating a paragraph break, see Pilcrow 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilcrow> and The Origin of the Pilcrow 
<https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-origin-of-the-pilcrow-aka-the-strange-paragraph-symbol-8610683/>. 
It looks like a mirrored “P” with a double stem and a filled-in bowl (hence 
also called “blind P”). But even better: Unicode contains a “Reversed 
Pilcrow Sign” (⁋, U+204B), which therefore looks like a “P”. “P” for 
“paragraph” and “Pandoc”.

[image: GoogleFontsReversePilcrow.png]

In order to be used for a design without charge, a free font would be 
optimal. I found the following 9 font families 
<https://fonts.google.com/selection?sort=alpha&selection.family=Cantarell|Cardo|Caudex|EB+Garamond|M+PLUS+1p|M+PLUS+Rounded+1c|Nova+Mono|Sawarabi+Gothic|Vollkorn> 
on Google Fonts containg the reversed Pilcrow sign: Cantarell, Cardo, 
Caudex, EB Garamond, M PLUS 1p, M PLUS Rounded 1c, Nova Mono, Sawarabi 
Gothic, and Vollkorn. Here is what the glyphs look like:

All fonts are licensed under SIL OFL 1.1, i.e. they can all used freely for 
logo design 
<https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=OFL-FAQ_web#c26665c2>. 
This page 
<https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/204b/fontsupport.htm> lists 
even more fonts containing the symbol, at least some of which are free.

Moreover, Font Awesome Free contains a “paragraph” icon 
<https://fontawesome.com/icons/paragraph?style=solid> (under CC BY 4.0)

[image: paragraph-solid.png]


whose design allows it to be simply flipped horizontally to generate a 
reverse Pilcrow sign. That’s what I’m currently using in my package.

My proposal is to simply use the glyph of the reversed Pilcrow sign in one 
of these fonts as the Pandoc logo. I like the classical elegance of EB 
Garamond’s, but also the simplicity of Cantarell’s and the robustness of 
Font Awesome’s.

On top of that, one could think of a variant of the Markdown mark by Dustin 
Curtis where the “M” is replaced by the reversed Pilcrow sign, to stand for 
Pandoc-flavored Markdown.

John & everybody, what do you think? 

Carsten

​

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