A blog about translation, writing and language in all its glorious aspects
I took part in a conversation on Twitter recently about converting files from PDF to Word without losing the formatting. In this case, it was for translation purposes but there are plenty of other circumstances where this would come in handy. Filling in forms sent as PDFs, for example (so without having to print them out …
Continue reading “Converting PDFs (for free) without losing the formatting — or your temper.”
My post on Tuesday (26 October) was about how to type an ellipsis; this one goes into a wee bit more detail about when you should do so. I’ve lifted the following straight from Wikipedia, mainly to save time but also because I love the following phrase: “the ellipsis can also inspire a feeling of …
Continue reading “Dot-dot-dot (2): when to type an ellipsis”
Here’s a quick tip that comes in handy for computer-typing in general and Twitter in particular (it saves you two characters). When you’re typing an ellipsis (three dots indicating an omission), instead of typing all three dots, type it as a single character by using the following keyboard shortcuts: Mac OS ellipsis: OPTION + semicolon …
I was puzzled last week to see references on Twitter to the exotic-sounding “Oxford comma”, a new term to me. It turns out (thank you, Mark Allen and Oxford Dictionaries) that the Oxford comma is another name for the “serial comma”: an optional comma before the word ‘and’ at the end of a list: We …
A test conducted by Printer.com compared ink consumption for different fonts. Century Gothic was found to use 30% less ink than Arial, used as a benchmark, and less even than Ecofont, designed with low consumption in mind. I use Century Gothic a lot as I like fonts with open “a” counters. For my old logo, my designer chose …
Dutch creative communications company Spranq has developed an ecofont that they say saves money and helps the environment by using less ink than other fonts. You can download the font free here. A professional version is also available for large organisations (Spranq will essentially punch holes in your corporate typeface to produce an environmentally-friendlier version). For people …