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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

It took me a while to realize that the author meant Smart (as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_%28automobile%29). Using the marketing typography made it seem generic, which I find amusing in some ironic way.

Also, speaking of typography, what's the deal with the bar over the 'o' in TransLoc? Is it like röck döts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_dots)?

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Thanks for clarification. I missed that completely at first. Even if the marketing dept. wants the logo in small caps, human-readable text has proper names capitalized. That's the way it should be.

> human-readable text has proper names capitalized

Apple products excluded, presumably...

The bar over the 'o' is a pronunciation hint. It means you should pronounce it with a "long o" sound. Therefore TransLōc is pronounced more like "Trans loak" and less like "Trans lock"

The bar over the ō is a macron. It is a diacritic marking a long vowel. Hence you should pronounce 'loc' like 'location.'

When I was a kid, that's how they showed a 'long' vowel as opposed to a short one. So it would be pronounced 'trans-loke' instead of 'trans-lock'.

I don't know the company, but that's my assumption for the logo.

I was always taught to capitalize names regardless of their branding. In other words, even though the logo is lowercase like Adidas, you don't spell it 'adidas' unless you're writing copy for the company and that's what it says to do in the branding guidelines. Similarly, you don't add an exclamation point to Yahoo when writing about the company.

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