And we all enjoyed the weekend for a change

[austin_dern]

There are, it appears, a couple of stairways closed around the Columbus Circle subway station in Manhattan. I know this because one of the many amusing blogs The New York Times keeps about quirky news items noticed that four of the advisor signs around the station advise people to use an alternate stairway for the subway entrance, across the street, at the ``Triumph Globe''. This is, as they noted, a mildly novel way of spelling Donald Trump's name.

The first thing lifting this above the ordinary typographical slip-up of the sort that fill up those irregularly sized books that lay irregularly on the shelves of the Humor section at the bookstore: New York City Transit spokesman Paul J Fleuranges said he just had to glance at the poster and he was able to pronounce it an Unofficial Sign. He's quoted as saying, ``It does not conform to our current standard, either in look, design or language,'' in a Times quote which does not conform to my standards regarding the serial comma. He also asserts that if the sign had gone through the proper channels then Trump's name would have been correctly spelled. He blames the contractor for the renovation project, and that the contractor is being ``reinstructed'' on proper signage. I don't doubt any of this, even though ``reinstructed'' does not seem to conform with my current built-in dictionary. (A Google search on ``reinstruct'' gave me 7,550 hits; for calibration, ``therblig'', a word coined by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth for time-and-motion studies, gives me 9,020 hits.)

What amuses me is they got all the way to the third comment before a person asked if they could tell the Transit agency that ``the dash in `Coney Island -- bound' should be an en dash, not a hyphen'', and that ``it's driving me insane!'' I don't doubt this at all, even if it was a joke. There's no way to tell the difference between an amusing joke and a severe level of derangement when you've delved into the world of typesetting people.

Trivia: The ultimate selection of seven Project Mercury astronauts from the 18 finalists was made by Space Task Group assistant director Charles J Donlan, flight surgeon Stanley C White, and Warren J North from NASA Headquarters. Source: This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, Loyd S Swenson Jr, James M Grimwood, Charles C Alexander. NASA SP-4201.

Currently Reading: A Ball, A Dog, and a Monkey: 1957 - The Space Race Begins, Michael D'Antonio.

Comments

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

"There's no way to tell the difference between an amusing joke and a severe level of derangement when you've delved into the world of typesetting people."

While this amused me parsed normally (and while I'm not really a typesetting person myself, I recognize the tendency when I do venture into typesetting and layout, making me wonder how much of it is the subject itself that does that to people rather than which sorts of people get into the field) ... I was also amused and alarmed to note that my brain won't let go of the phrase "typesetting people" and and trying to conjure images of what it means to typeset a person. (A half dozen different visualizations so far ...)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't worry about the typesetting of people. Everyone coming out of that process is a stereotype anyway.

I really do mean to sympathize with people who worry about the differences between em dashes and en dashes (I assume there's en dashes) and hyphens and such, since having a robust set of tools means one can be precise and avoid ambiguity except when it's a deliberate effect, and we can't have that benefit unless we follow the appropriate and generally not too oppressive rules consistently enough.

But when you get to signage, where you need to be able to communicate something quickly and attractively enough graphic design appeal that people don't mind -- ideally, even like -- what they see, then we run into things where an em dash might be used consistently for some other purpose than cementing word fragments together, or where a shorter dash leaves the composition worse-balanced, or so on. So we're forced to decide what rules to toss overboard in favor of other consistencies or communication of clues, which makes nobody happy. (It did go against my nature to use -- instead of - in copying ``Coney Island--bound'', but there seemed no other way to express the nature of the complaint. I also don't know what purpose a shorter dash might serve. My guess would be for conjoined station names. I don't know of any such stations offhand, but there's about 2,038 stations in New York City and surely at least some of them have freakish names.)

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

A winner is you.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I think my central problem is I grew up working on fixed-width systems where you just had -, --, and maybe, if you were going to get really wild about something, ---, and there was never much point distinguishing hyphens and dashes except possibly as what you want their semantic content to be. And em versus en dashes, well, that's like arguing over what accent you should use in the word that's necessarily written without accent marks.

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

Apparently in TeX -- gets you an en dash and --- leads to an em dash.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yes, and it's an awful nuisance in the occasional case where you actually do specifically need multiple separate dashes, as for instance when reproducing computer code, and sometimes in mathematical expressions where you want to make a point of there being several multiplications going on in the same term.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

There are em and en dashes. There was a separate key for each, labeled as such, on the typesetting machine that I used at my high school job at the local newspaper.

[orv.livejournal.com]

I believe they're named such because they're the width of an M and N, respectively, or at least they were in some fonts.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's at least what Adobe likes to think they are, which is probably as close to definitive as we could find without pulling open my Linotype Operator's Manual.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You'd had an actual machine? I'd had ... well, PageMaker from high school. In middle school we used some program whose name I now forget, for the Apple II, on which we had pages divided into either six or eight panels and it was a real pain if you wanted an article to run into, say, the panel underneath it. We put up with some really bizarre things back then.

(We switched to the program, whatever its name was, after the new teacher supervising the paper discovered what an awful pain it was typing everything up by typewriter and glueing it to a paper for duplication.)

In elementary school I think they used a typewriter, but I submitted my things for it hand-written and for some reason wasn't involved in the typesetting.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

The machines -- already antiquated, I suspect, by 1995 when I started working there -- were computers in huge, blue, metal cases. They had a small monochrome monitor, and keyboards with keys for every possible command. There was no command line, and the alphabetic keys were for typesetting only, so there were keys for things like "justify" and "print," which were then followed by the "execute" key. It was not WYSIWYG, of course, so instructions for changing font, bolding, etc., were interspersed with the text. The machine took 8" floppy disks, and there was a printer built into it. It had a large drum on which could be mounted two font strips. When you ran something off, it came out on a continuous roll of paper which was then separated with a built-in blade that slid from side to side. It appeared to be blank when it came out, and then one had to take it over and feed it into a horribly chemical-smelling machine that "developed" it.

The next step was to put it in the editor's in-tray. The editor was a crotchety old guy who smoked a pipe, and no, I'm not conflating my life with a comic book or anything like that. He did all the copy-editing as well as pretty much everything else. There was also an assistant editor, who was really the sole reporter and photographer for the paper. Once the editor made corrections, a sheet of individual lines of corrected text was printed out, run through the hot wax machine, and then snipped apart and pasted over the original article. Finally the article was run through the waxer again and pasted up onto the big sheets that hung on slanted boards all around the office.

My other job, besides typesetting, was to peel the advertisements back off the old master each week so they could be reused.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I never had anything that antiquated, relative to the time. My high school newspaper -- well, I wasn't involved with that, but I did work on a newsletter for a special program, and that was on a Macintosh SE. For the college paper, it was Macintosh Pluses and SEs, until we finally got the LC III, with the nice tall monitor just perfect for playing Civilization. Oh, and for laying out the newspaper.

The daily paper at college -- which I wasn't on -- had what must have been pretty near the top of the line for typesetting newspapers in 1980, although it was showing its strain by the early 90s. (Among other things, we were amused to learn their internal files had to store files for their weekly magazine inset under the name the magazine had before 1985, because nobody any more remembered how to change the folder name or create a new folder on the system.)

They did print-out and paste-up at a separate facility, though, somewhere off-site. We printed things out in our office on the Apple LaserWriter and pasted it up on boards with our own hot wax machine. This hot wax machine was the envy of the daily paper's staff, though, and they were almost as delighted with it as we were delighted with their photocopier.

We also used the wax machine as a convenient way to attach most anything we wanted to walls, filing cabinets, and in a few cases the slower-moving members of the staff.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I used to enjoy the smell of the wax as it heated up on a Saturday morning. I always loved the wax machine. I'm odd.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

We had a succession of wax machines, one of which was a handheld unit that didn't work at all. But we finally got one that was wide enough for a whole 8.5-by-11 sheet at once and that was mighty sweet. Years later I revisited the office and learned they had gone entirely to electronic paste-up; I was mighty tempted to steal the forlorn wax machine. I might still buy one for my own use.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I, too, was trained to use the serial comma (which I have heard called the "Harvard comma," and which Wikipedia now informs me is also called the "Oxford comma") and am bothered by its absence.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I've heard it called the Harvard Comma, and the Oxford Comma; I think it's naturally gravitated to whatever university is able to put up a snooty enough reputation for itself. Of course, that makes me curious what it is in other languages.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I prefer the serial comma as well, but I'm also very comma-friendly.

Also, I'm fine with 'reinstruct', though I'd perhaps spell it as re-instruct. Not that it would be confused as rein-struct except at Christmas time, and you try to rhyme 'struct' in a carol.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd use re-instruct, since it is, apparently, a relatively rare word and setting the prefix off like that makes it more recognizable. Maybe someday re-instruct will be so common the hyphen can be done away with, as to-day, to-morrow, and space-ship managed, but I don't think it's there yet.