Saturday, November 21, 2009

Sunday, November 15, 2009

A typographer's Twitter tip

Updated with contributions from anonymous and parkrrrr

I’m becoming accustomed to the 140-character limit on Twitter posts, and I’m abbreviating (2 for “to,” 4 for “for,” and so forth) when I have to. But I also see an opportunity for character-shaving that most others are not using, perhaps because of inconvenience. So, as a public service, here are some one-character punctuation marks for you to copy and paste, together with the Windows keyboard shortcuts and Mac keyboard shortcuts (last column, submitted by an anonymous commenter) if you’d rather type them yourself.

Replace "..." with ellipsis … Alt+0133 Opt+;
Replace "--" with em dash — Alt+0151 Opt+Shift+-
Replace " - " with en dash – Alt+0150 Opt+-
Replace " + " with bullet • Alt+0149 Opt+8
Replace " | " with pilcrow ¶ Alt+0182 Opt+7
Replace "ae" with ligature æ Alt+0230
Replace "oe" with ligature œ Alt+0156
The following have no shortcuts, but you can copy and paste.

Replace RT with ℞ but cpdavey suggests recycling symbol, ♺
Replace !? with ‽
Replace fi with fi
Replace fl with fl
Replace No with №

Do you have others you would like me to add?

Friday, November 13, 2009

Bragging on behalf of a client

A client I helped with his first novel wrote another and asked me to give it a quick once-over. He now reports that he has signed a representation agreement with a literary agent and hopes to report back in due time that he has a publisher as well. Way to go, S.H.!

Monday, November 02, 2009

Buy me a copy for Christmas

Here is a video that demonstrates a lot of old crafts and technologies in book production. Bibliophiles must watch this. People who think a font is a computer file ought to watch this. Enjoy. Thanks to Beth Burke for bringing this to my attention.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Novelists: read this!

Here’s a bright idea. The author is a project management pro in his day job, so maybe this is easier for him than it is for you. Nonetheless…

“My writing is carefully planned, and a spreadsheet collects my scene-by-scene word count and provides a projection of overall word count based on average words per scene so far. Thus, I could quickly realize if, for example, I was headed for an impractical word count of 30,000 words or 250,000 words.”
—novelist David Chesworth