←
→
owlfish: (Laptop with wireless mouse)
Add MemoryShare This Entry

Punctuation in the news

posted by [personal profile] owlfish at 01:47pm on 14/10/2009 under
Recent news articles on punctuation:

The exclamation point is not trademarkable!

Tim Berners-Lee apologies for forward slashes // in URLs. It didn't have to be this way.

Nearly a month ago now, Steve posted at Glossographia on a typology of quotation marks.

And finally, thanks to a question from [livejournal.com profile] theengineer, if you'd like to find out what font a particular piece of punctuation (or other printed character) is in, try What the Font, from My Fonts.
←
→
There are 11 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
cdave: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] cdave at 12:58pm on 14/10/2009
You got a little bit of tracker stuck on your last URL there.
[link] [reply]
cdave: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] cdave at 01:01pm on 14/10/2009
And here's a more manual font identifier.
[link] [parent] [reply]
owlfish: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] owlfish at 01:08pm on 14/10/2009
That's a good approach too.
[link] [parent] [reply]
owlfish: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] owlfish at 01:06pm on 14/10/2009
Thanks. It's a lovely and clean URL now (give or take the necessary //)
[link] [parent] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] steepholm.livejournal.com at 01:38pm on 14/10/2009
On the way to school this morning, my daughter asked of "A Hard Day's Night": is it "It's worth it just to hear you say you're going to give me everything?" or "It's worth it just to hear you say, 'You're going to give me everything.'"?

Those are two very different kinds of relationship!
[link] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] fjm.livejournal.com at 02:10pm on 14/10/2009
Surely the computer manufacturers could add a single key. If we have @ on one key, why not http:// ?
[link] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] sollersuk.livejournal.com at 03:13pm on 14/10/2009
@ is there because it was used, originally in handwriting, long before computers were even thought of (and I'm including Babbage here). My original manual typewriter had it, back in the days when a computer took up a whole suite of rooms.
[link] [parent] [reply]
owlfish: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] owlfish at 03:30pm on 14/10/2009
I can see the argument for making http:// a single character, although it would further concretize its presence in URLs. (It would be a pain to get rid of them now but still - I like to think - possible. Making them a single character in general use on keyboards would make it that much harder to change URL conventions.)

& started life as two separate characters, and the ellipsis started life as three. Each is now a single typographic character, although of course it can be argued that their unions also predate typography in the modern sense. On the other hand, there are a great many other characters which usually lose their ligatures when moving from handwriting to most modern typefaces.
[link] [parent] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] sollersuk.livejournal.com at 05:11pm on 14/10/2009
The modern form of & goes back to Caroline Minuscule, making it over 1,000 years old! Different shaped ligatures of "e" and "t" are about half a millennium older.
[link] [parent] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] fjm.livejournal.com at 05:00am on 17/10/2009
ah well., a nice idea, and I'm sure they could manage it if they tried :-)
[link] [parent] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] darktouch.livejournal.com at 09:03am on 15/10/2009
Seriously, which marketing 'genius' had the bright idea to waste the company's money trying to get ! trademarked?
[link] [reply]

October

SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
1
 
 2
 
 3
 
 4
 
 5
 
 6
 
 7
 
8
 
 9
 
 10
1
 11
 
 12
 
 13
 
 14
 
15
 
 16
 
 17
 
 18
 
 19
 
 20
 
 21
 
22
 
 23
 
 24
 
 25
 
 26
 
 27
 
 28
 
29
 
 30
 
 31