I found out that the pages are out of alignment when viewed with IE 6, but it seems to be fine with either Firefox or IE 7.
Part of that may be due to using the default theme for the page which I’m planning to change when I get a chance.
Which reminds me, sometime I need to write about the importance of standardization!
It goes by many names: the number sign, the musical sharp, the hash and the pound sign (not to be confused with the British currency symbol, £). This week I learned that a Spanish name for it is almohadilla, which means “little pillow.” The theory is that the little pillows with tassels on the corners resemble the # sign.
The symbol’s traditional commercial use in the U.S. was such that when it followed a number, it was to be read as “pounds,” as in 5# of sugar, and when it preceded a number, it was to be read as ‘number’, as in #2 pencil. Internationally, the most common English name for it is the hash mark and # is also commonly used as a comment sign in many computer shell scripts and programming code.
That’s probably the most useful bit of trivia I learned this week.
See the wikipedia entry for more of its uses and names in other languages.
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While I’m on the topic of orthography, if you aren’t running Windows Vista or Office 2007/2008, you can still download and use Microsoft’s new ClearType Font Collection (or C-fonts, since most of them start with C) by installing the free 2007 PowerPoint Viewer. The fonts are: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel and Segoe UI. They are highly regarded for their excellent on-screen readability as well as in print. Here’s a sample of what they look like:
Images from: http://www.ascendercorp.com/ctfonts.htm Click to see them full size and not compressed by my page’s narrow formatting.
The biggest problem with the new fonts is that some are noticeably smaller than Microsoft’s existing fonts like Arial, Times New Roman and Comic Sans so you or your web developer have to increase the font size to compensate. This problem has been noted by the NeoSmart Files where they have suggested a way for web developers to work around the issue.
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So what’s the big deal about computer fonts you ask? Bad fonts were blamed in 2002 when British air traffic controllers sent a plane into the wrong airspace and cause controllers to have difficulty distinguishing between airport codes.
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