Manual: •.,:;…!?·
104 points by behnamoh 3 days ago | 21 comments
malkia 8 hours ago
Садись. Двойка! - "Sit down, you got an F" :) - sorry, as bulgarian it was funny to me this used as example (from russian).
replyjonhohle 8 hours ago
There’s a quick note about the interrobang (‽) at the end. I’ve long had it in my macOS/iOS text replacement config, but nearly every font renders it so poorly that I usually manually retype the characters. It looks like a typographical mistake more often than communicating the questioned surprise that’s intended.
replyThere was a push a few years ago by some modern fonts (as illustrated in the article) to place the overlapping exclamation and question mark at a 30-45° from each other while sharing the same dot below, which is a huge improvement, but I doubt older fonts will ever be updated.
Grom_PE 2 hours ago
Linux:
replyCompose key, period, period = ellipsis …
Compose key, period, equals = bullet •
Compose key, period, minus = interpunct ·
Compose key, !, ? = interrobang ‽
encom 5 hours ago
>In European and many other languages[...]
replyWhat? I was taught danish, english, german, french - never European.
guff_se 8 hours ago
Interesting how the article does not “delve” into the use of the emdash, considering its own excessive use of it.
replyzahlman 5 hours ago
Reference to the emdash qua LLM-ism is now more of a cliche than the actual LLM use thereof. What grates about AI slop is the actual prose, and the writing here is just fine, frankly. Most importantly, it's not trying to pad out insignificant points, sound like marketing copy, etc.
reply
1: https://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/
For 99.9% of people, as long as the meaning is clear, they’ll never even register that the wrong code point, wrong symbol, or even wrong formatting was used. While I prefer correctness when possible, I’ve come to terms that others only care about communicating their intent.
IMHO that's an old-school-ism: I've never seen that in the post-Unicode world, but I recall its being common in the days of PC-compatibles, when square root was one of the ~256 characters you got, and checkmark wasn't, so you made do. In the same bucket with "using eszett (ß) as a lowercase beta (β)" or "using upper-half-of-integral (⌠) as a long S (ſ)." In fact Wikipedia's footnotes mention all three of these substitutions. (Or "using hyphen-minus (-) as a minus sign (−)." ;))
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
[2] - https://knowware.dk/dos56/norton-commander-1.shtml — see the last two screenshots on this page, from Norton Commander
On a Mac, the facility you’re given to pick emoji (which is also the same palette you’d need to pick a fancy checkmark Unicode) is horrifyingly bad - it’s slow and hard to use, and has been getting worse.
Of course, iOS, whose emoji picker is pretty nice by comparison, completely lacks a first-party character palette and doesn’t support the “option key” method, so on iOS, it’s emoji or nothing.
Ugh, I hate this too.
- Slow animation to open -- search field is not focused until the animation finishes.
- Keyboard navigation is horrible. I never know if it can be trusted, because sometimes it can't? I'll press Enter to select the symbol I want, and it'll defocus the text field. If I don't catch it and click back in the text field fast enough, I'll have to re-open the menu and try again, but by clicking this time. So why try the keyboard in the first place?
- Slow animation to close -- when I open the menu accidentally (I have it set to Fn press) it feels like nearly a second of wait before my application is interactive again.
We can learn from both!
We can appreciate the intuitiveness of languages with looser grammar, and the rational elegance of stricter languages. And then there’s French :)
One proxy to try to answer this question would be to look at what successfull advertisements use (not necessarily the ones that win prices, but the ones that drive up sales). Their advertisment media might have other qualities that might offset typography/styling sins, but they are more likely to be intentional about using typography/styling to get their point across.