Blog Archives

Yes, I am the kind of person who spends 15 minutes searching for the multiplication sign. 8-}

May 22

Posted by

Yes, I’m the guy who just spent 15 minutes searching for the Mac keyboard shortcut for the mathematical “times” or “multiply” sign [×]. There is no shortcut; however, I did learn that the official name for this glyph is “multiplication sign” (who knew?), the Unicode identifier is 00D7, the HTML name code is “times”, the HTML number code is 215 (but I can’t show the HTML code without WordPress converting it, apparently), the Unicode identifier is 00D7, and the Windows keyboard entry method is Alt+0215. For my Mac, I opened Edit, Special Characters, typed in “multiplication sign”, and saved the glyph to my Favorites.

If you’re interested, some of my other favorites are the “beamed eighth notes” to symbolize music [♫], the “black heart suit” sign [♥] to symbolize love, the French quotation marks, or «guillemets», a.k.a. “left-pointing double angle quotation mark” [«] and “right-pointing double angle quotation mark” [»], the proper characters to denote the feet and inches in my height, 5′ 11″, called the “prime” [′] and “double prime” [″], and the “trade mark sign” [™] which I like to use sarcastically to represent that something that should be bottled and sold, such as doing typography The Right Way™.

Thanks to Arnold Winkelried aka Noodles for his webpage, Keyboard Shortcuts for special characters, which answered my question about the multiplication sign that I had read at least a dozen other pages in search of.

And now, with the (at least) 15 minutes I spent on writing this blog post, I have spent a half an hour more than the average (and maybe saner) person who would type 2 x 2 and be done with it. But I console myself with the knowledge that there are hundreds of nerds like me out there who will be glad that I shared this seemingly trivial information with them. So there! :-)

P.S. I just spent another 20 minutes trying to write the HTML name and number codes without having them converted to the × character itself. Fighting with technology before 8 AM on a Sunday morning, oy!

Posted in Writing for the Web

1 Comment

Tags: , , , ,

CSS Font Properties Test

Feb 1

Posted by

[This page resided at http://danielgreene.com/fontprop.html from 1998–2010.]

A Demonstration of CSS Font Properties

Property Value Display in Your Browser
Property Value Display in Your Browser
font-family serif The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
sans-serif The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
cursive The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
fantasy The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
monospace The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
font-style normal The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
italic The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
oblique The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
font-variant normal The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
small-caps The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
font-weight normal The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
bold The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
bolder The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
lighter The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
100 The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
200 The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
300 The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
400 The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
500 The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
600 The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
700 The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
800 The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
900 The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
font-size
<absolute-size>		 xx-small The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
x-small The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
small The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
medium The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
large The quick brown fox jumps…
x-large The quick brown fox…
xx-large The quick brown…
font-size
<relative-size>		 larger The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
smaller The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
font-size
<length>
(arbitrary
examples—
non-scalable
values)		 12pt The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
1pc The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
72pt The…
1in The…
10mm The quick…
1cm The quick…
12px The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
font-size
<length>
(arbitrary
examples—
scalable
values)		 1em The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
1.2em The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
1ex The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
1.2ex The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
font-size
<percentage>
(arbitrary
examples)		 100% The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
120% The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
150% The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
225% The quick brown…
338% The quick…

Using the Shorthand font Property Read the rest of this entry →

Posted in Writing for the Web

2 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Bug in Backgrounds for DIV Elements

Jan 1

Posted by

[This page resided for many years at http://danielgreene.com/cssbug.html]

Results are shown when using the following embedded CSS declarations [now done with inline CSS because this blog doesn't allow embedded CSS.]:

code { font-family: Fixedsys, "Lucida Console",
"Courier New", monospace; }
.p { background: #CFC; /*lightest green*/
     color: black; }
.v { background: #CFF; /*lightest blue*/
     color: black; }
.d { background: #FCF; /*lightest purple*/
     color: black; }
.samp { background: #FCF; /*lightest purple*/
     color: black;
     margin: 1em 3em;
     border: thin solid black;
     padding: 5mm; }
.test { background: #CCC; /*lightest gray*/
     padding: 1em; }

Here’s how it looks in your browser:

{ font: 150% serif; }

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

This is what it looked like in my browser (MSIE 4.72.2106.8 for Win95): Read the rest of this entry →

Posted in Writing for the Web

1 Comment

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.