Manual: •.,:;…!?· | Hacker News Reader

Manual: •.,:;…!?·

type.today

132 pointsbehnamoh34 comments

Somehow it is always Russian technologists and designers who sweat this type of stuff the most and want to talk about it. When I moved from Russia to a western country in my teenage years, as a fledging web developer and previously an avid Kovodstvo [1] reader, I remember feeling upset, surprised, and deeply disappointed by the state of the real-world English language - particularly when it came to punctuation. It shocked me to see how loose and vibe-y it was, even in professional contexts. Nowadays, I understand that the majority of the world’s population has a much more casual relationship with the formal rules of their language, if those exist at all, compared to the hyper-pedantic Russians. I’m not one to say who really should be learning from whom.

1: https://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/

I’m not a typographic nut (though I care about it more than the average American), but one of the worst trends I’ve seen is to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark (). I’ve even seen Apple do it. It doesn’t help that the checkmark glyph is generally terrible, and at least on a Mac, the shortcut (⌥+V) exists for square root, and happens to be something a Windows user might accidentally find when transitioning to Mac key bindings while the checkmark requires either knowing true code point and how to enter that in or going to the Emoji & Symbols panel.

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.

> to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark ([filtered out])

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

I’ll own up to being someone who does this when I’m on a Mac. The reason is simple: they don’t give you a way to type a “real” check. And though Emoji contain suitable ones, those aren’t always appropriate (or allowed, such as here).

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.

> 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.

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.

Thank you for better articulating what's wrong with it way better than I could. Sometimes the text field doesn't even focus for me.

I do use LaunchBar's emoji search, which basically works exactly like it should, instantly searching the emoji names, and Enter to insert it, but I have to remember to configure it on every Mac and then have to remember what shortcut I assigned it.

I personally think that it's just fun and “in the spirit” of writing to be pedantic about it and typographically expressive in general. In many ways, writing is a very creative process, because it involves “fixating thoughts”, making something very analogue into something almost (but not completely) discrete; it's akin to graphic design in general in my eyes. And when I can bring some extra flavour to it – by sticking to pedantic rules, using rare typographic marks that have a meaning that's more historical now, or anything else – I tend to do it, even if just for my own amusement.

I do not mean this to be lessen the craft of typography (which I am certain that it is!): For me, typography/styling beyond the very basics of bold, underline, italics and so on feels a bit like an aquired taste. Whenever I engage with related contend, I hear claims being made like "A helps to convey X", or "B and C should not mix, else Y!" - and I don't doubt that these claims are true, but I wonder if they are true for a selected few who pay attention to such things, or to statistically average person. My gut feeling would be that there are handful of claims that provably help get a message/intention across to a big group of people due to a mix of convention and how our brain processes what it sees - and at least 3/4 of claims that would not show such effect.

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.

> I’m not one to say who really should be learning from whom.

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 :)

That's pretty funny, I had in some sense the opposite experience. Learning Russian, at the point where I got beyond the beginner stage, I was really put off by the intense prescriptivism. As you learn languages you also learn that they all have their own pet-peeves (usually functioning like class markers). But in Russian it's taken to a point where linguistic diversity is looked down (perhaps apart from specialized slang) even in informal conversations. This is probably also related to the fact that the language famously has very little dialectical variation, which is especially surprising given the size of the country where it originates from.

Same for French, and this is due to the centralized state that enforced uniformity.

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.

There 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.

This article was the first time I saw that variation of the interrobang with the ! and ? angled and sharing the dot, but… man… I think I am in love‽

Садись. Двойка! - "Sit down, you got an F" :) - sorry, as bulgarian it was funny to me this used as example (from russian).

"Садись, два» is more idiomatic

Linux:

Compose key, period, period = ellipsis …

Compose key, period, equals = bullet •

Compose key, period, minus = interpunct ·

Compose key, !, ? = interrobang ‽

Windows needs to just adopt this rather than punish users with the alt codes. Compose key is so much better than dicking around with an IME or dead keys.

Russians solved this almost 20 years ago with two (one for Russian and one for English) custom layouts where right alt is used a separate typography layer.

For example rightAlt + c will give you ©, rightAlt+- will give you em-dash —

Both for mac and windows:

https://ilyabirman.ru/typography-layout/

I have made a keyboard layout for Windows that abuses dead keys and AltGr as a substitute for compose key, the difference being that such compose key needs to be held while typing the first character:

https://github.com/grompe/kbdasm (kbdusru_undead.asm)

But then there would be no space for the extremely useful Copilot key!

I actually find dead keys quite practical. MacOS uses those, and it allows me to easily type French on a US keyboard. This also allows you to easily type other symbols, like •, º, etc. Maybe not everything, but it's fine for my needs.

I've spent quite some time to figure how to make Linux do the same. Turns out it's rather easy: just set the layout to macintosh, and remap some key to "level 3 shift".

I've actually went all in on the mac layout, so I've remapped the win (left) and menu (right) keys to this, so it's in the same spot as on the mac, which helps with muscle memory. Since caps is useless anyway, I've moved super there.

Now this is a bit more involved on Windows, but it's doable. There is a "macintosh" layout available on github, and it's possible to remap the keys using the registry as on Linux.

> According to GOST technical standards, Russian language uses the semicolon to denote time:

Is it correct that Russian officially uses a semicolon (;) to separate time elements, or is this just a translation error?

> : (semicolon) for separating the elements of the time of the day (‘day’, ‘minute’, ‘minute and second’);

The example right below it seems to make clear that it's just an error, but then I wondered if the use of a regular colon (:) there was somehow the error instead.

in German, the period marks ordinal numbers

  das 2. Mal = the 2nd time

In Hungarian, too. Most likely due to German influence.

> The period is used as a decimal symbol in English language — as well as in the language of former British colonies, in China, Japan, and some other countries.

This one, as a native french speaker, is the bane of my existence since I started using computers 42 years ago.

To me having the period/dot as the decimal symbol simply makes sense and I see both the period/dot and the comma as valid decimal symbols. And I really wish I could say: "either period/dot or comma as the decimal symbol, and NEVER EVER any separator for thousands/millions, etc.".

Because both:

    12.48

and

    12,48

do make sense.

While either:

   1,000,000.77

or:

   1.000.000,77

are DUMBFUCKTARDED notations.

And I'm not alone in thinking that:

"The 22nd General Conference on Weights and Measures[27] declared in 2003, "The symbol for the decimal marker shall be either the point on the line or the comma on the line." It further reaffirmed,[27]

Numbers may be divided in groups of three in order to facilitate reading; neither dots nor commas are ever inserted in the spaces between groups

That is, "1 000 000 000" is preferred over "1,000,000,000" or "1.000.000.000". This use has therefore been recommended by technical organizations, such as the United States's National Institute of Standards and Technology."

But because sooooo many software still use those dumbfucktarded notations where pointless separators are used to needlessly separate groups, it's not possible to say:

"either dot/period/comma is the decimal separator"

Wanna talk about co-workers having different locales and online spreadsheet with numbers looking different? What about a spreadsheet where on one computer a formula begins with:

    =SUM(...

while on another computer, on the same desk, that freaking same formula is:

    =SOMME(...

This is facepalming retardation on a level of fucktardedness that cannot be understated.

Agreed. I've started to use space now as the decimal separator and trying to spread the gospel.

Original title:

Manual: •.,:;…!?·

(Except printed in a really cool font!)

I'm turning on cancel culture, no russian reading

Nice reference – thanks for the post!

>In European and many other languages[...]

What? I was taught danish, english, german, french - never European.

In European languages, and in many other languages that are not European.

Interesting how the article does not “delve” into the use of the emdash, considering its own excessive use of it.

There is a separate manual for dashes: https://type.today/en/journal/dash

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.

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