Fonts

[stephec]

The first time I got a PC and wrote a word document I spent ages messing about with different sizes and styles, the novelty wore off after a couple of days and I don't think I've changed them since, apart from maybe the size and underlining for a title. 😊

 

[srw]

Always worth avoiding Gill Sans because Eric Gill was an utter bastard.

Opportunity for thread to segue off into cancel culture

He wasn't completely bad, he merely believed in sexual communion with everyone, including his family, and even the dog.
But his typography is near genius, and his sculpture pretty good.

By modern standards everyone from Beethoven to Dickens to Lewis Carroll to Leonardo were complete bastards. That doesn't mean they didn't produce some sublime and enduring works of art. Including Gill Sans.

To the point, one of Eric Gill's masterworks was a book:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/196/196147/an-essay-on-typography/9780141393568.html

It's very thought provoking. There's a more generalist book too:

https://www.simongarfield.com/books/just-my-type/

Good font selection matters for the same reason that any other kind of design choice matters - it enhances or detracts from the message.

 

[Profpointy]

good point. Whatever happened to putting a slash through a zero to differentiate it from O?

Just like the Danish do with their O

 

[Profpointy]

I've clicked on 'Forgotten your password?' buttons on some websites and they then email the forgotten password to me!***



*** For those ignorant in such matters, that is VERY bad for 2 reasons...

1. It shows that the website must be storing passwords in plain text form. If a hacker gets into their system then all passwords are sitting there ready to be grabbed.
2. Normal email is also sent in plain text and vulnerable to interception by n'er-do-wells.

What should happen is that the website is unable to retrieve your password so instead you are sent a reset link with a short time limit on it. You click the link and quickly enter a replacement password.

That is really really bad and I'm genuinely shocked that anyone would still store passwords in a retreivable way. That was very bad practice 20 years ago

To elaborate for the general reader, you "encrypt" (wrong term but it'll do) the password using a "one way" algorithm - ie there's no practical way of getting it back. Then, when the user enters their password, you encrypt what they've typed and see if it matches. You can never get at the original version. Anything else is simply a shyte way of doing it.

 

[Profpointy]

AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgggghhhhhhh

Every time work gives me a new laptop or there is some other unavoidable corporate upgrade windows reverts to replacing (c).
I have to quote legislation which always has sub-paragraphs numbered (a), (b), et seq and have never in my life had to type a copyright symbol.
[/rant]

A work colleague, a very able guy, said he wanted to develop an application iamnotafarkwit.exe which you'd run after each upgrade of MS Office. It would disable the annoying paperclip, autoreplace, "I think you a typing a letter" and all the other "helpful" shyte that makes your job more difficult. I'd buy a copy, but sadly he never did it

 

[MichaelW2]

In the tv drama "First Born" about a human/gorilla hybrid, scientist Charles Dance types his diary entries into a computer and we can trace the years from 1970s green VAX minicomputer terminal, through all the various advances in typography and word processing.

 

[Badger_Boom]

I too worked in a company pretentious enough to have their own font. It was expensively produced specifically for our company which was great, except any time you sent emails or documents to people outside the company they could not read it and defaulted to a basic Times New Roman which made everything look terrible. We moved on from that debacle to a standard font, just ne of the lesser known ones, the problem with this font is that an 'i' looks almost exactly the same as a 'l', so I spend my entire time wincing when reading emails and documentation.

My company also recently commissioned a special corporate font, and it looks pretty good. Fortunately, they haven't adopted the practice of a previous employer that had some special characters that displayed their logo in documents. If you didn't have it installed on your PC (like everyone who didn't work for them) it defaulted to Wingdings which was ... interesting.

 

[CharlesF]

Something for the weekend, Sir?

Here's a screenshot of a document I put together many years ago - I usually have a printed version somewhere I can see or reach quickly (in a notebook or on a noticeboard). The ones I commonly use like °, ö, ü, ä, é I know from memory now, others I can usually get to with a few guesses. I hate seeing lazy/ignorant use of things like º (superscript 0) instead of ° (degree) and even x (lower case x) instead of × (multiply). The grey-backed characters will work almost universally across different programs but the amber ones I usually have to go to MS Word to type them and then copy/paste to my required location (eg ≈).

For some I have created automatic replace options in Windows - so for example if I type (C) it will auto-replace to © or CO2 will become CO₂.
View attachment 587574

Takes me back to the days of DOS, Windows 95 and dBase using the Windows ALT Codes to draw borders, etc. around the text boxes. We obviously had a lot of time!