For art in printing is not the way Of wild extravagance, weird display, But rather the unobtrusive thrall Of type that gives you no shock at all, But draws your eye to the page with zest And holds your mind to the thought expressed; We must keep ourselves to this simple creed, Type was made […]
More evidence of typographic rage: The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. I have posted on this phenomenon before, here, here, here, and here. Perhaps I need a new tag for this issue. However, it’s the difference wherein the interest lies. Unlike obsessing about straight versus typographic quotes this is more straightforwardly a “semantic” issue about […]
As I have remarked before, good typography does not merely have aesthetic virtue. Importantly, it has cognitive virtue as well. Good typesetting makes your work easier to understand. A good font is but one element of typesetting, and a font may be appropriate to one context but not others. Still, font choice is one of […]
Apparently. Jan Freeman in an article, Sex and the semicolon, reports the views of Ben McIntyre writing for the Times of London (otherwise unattributed—like many sites relying on advertising, the Boston Globe seems not to use external links, see O’Reilly for an explanation): Kurt Vonnegut called the marks “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” Hemingway and […]
From the rut—typographic snoot gone gangsta:
The Ten Commandments of Unicode: I am Unicode, thy character set. Thou shalt have no other character sets before me.
Typographic rage is a new meme: Grammar nazis are so last century. Welcome, friends, to the brave new world of the typography nazi. Help make cognitive therapy an effective counter meme.
While on matters typographical, I thought I would continue the monospaced font roundup with Aurulent Sans Mono a free (as in speech and beer) monospace font by Stephen G. Hartke. Available under the Open Font License, Aurulent Sans Mono is a humanist sans serif that comes in italic, bold, and bold italic variants (no slashed […]
Language Log often writes about word rage—the irrational hostility to perceived misusage. Very often the prescribed usage is a stylistic preference elevated to the status of a grammatical rule. Mark Liberman has recently recommended that word rage might effectively be treated with cognitive therapy. Perhaps we need to recognize another malady—typographic rage. Recently manifest not […]
As a follow up to my last post and as an act of allegiance to all things typographically correct, I have just installed PHP SmartyPants Typographer, Michel Fortin’s PHP port of John Gruber’s SmartyPants: SmartyPants is a free web publishing plug-in for Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit that easily translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into […]
TV Spot 2 - Where Will You Be? Following Daringfireball’s link to Apostrphe Atrophy (whose site seems to be down, hopefully termporarily), there was a flurry of comments on MetaFilter militating in favor of straight quotes: I always turn off “smart quotes” in Word. I think it looks pretentious. I agree! Up with the “dumb […]
You can force Mail.app on OS X to use UTF-8 with the following command: defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset “UTF-8” As I have posted earlier, you should be using UTF-8 for all your plain text needs. Dont trust me? Then trust Allan.
Continuing the series of posts on monospace fonts, we consider the question “Do androids dream in monospace fonts?” Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation has designed the Droid Typeface Family for the Open Handest Alliance’s Android platform. Released under the Apache license, Droid Sans Mono is an attractive monospace font. It is not without its limitations, […]
I have been planning a follow up to my previous post about monospace fonts. This is not the planned follow up. However, background reserarch has uncovered an interesting monospace font with special properties. DPCustomMono2, commissioned by Distributed Proofreaders, is designed to maximize the legibility of text for the purposes of proofreading. Given the special context, […]
Based on the sans serif typeface Akzidenz Grotesk, Helvetica was designed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry (later assimilated by Linotype). Originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, its name was updated to Helvetica apparently derived from the latin name for Switzerland—Helvetia. Caught up in an enthusiasm for Swiss modernist […]
I am a theme whore. Not only have I downloaded all the themes on the TextMate Wiki, I have tried my hand at making my own. Switching between themes helps cut down the eye-strain, and some are better suited to different ambient lighting conditions than others. But there is more to this inconstancy. Though irrational, […]
sympoze
Powered by FireStats Powered by FireStats Powered by FireStats