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Yes, I am the kind of person who spends 15 minutes searching for the multiplication sign. 8-}
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!
Why I chose the Coraline theme & the Eaglefeather font
WordPress Blog Theme
The WordPress Coraline theme came out the other day, and I like it because:
- It has a “Leave a comment” link that can’t be missed. The one in the Twenty Ten theme is hard to find. I want to engage readers in conversation, and a loud “Leave a comment” or “# comments” link grants them easy entry.
- It allows for a body, feature bar, and two sidebars beneath the feature bar. This means I can feature my latest tweets. And knowing that whatever I tweet will be featured prominently on my blog might give me pause before I tweet while drunk. Not that I would ever do that!
- Like the Twenty Ten theme and the Kubrick theme before it, it allows me to have a banner image, which I think it is fun.
- I can use the right sidebar to feature my latest Flickr photos on par with my categories, tag cloud, etc. in the left sidebar.
Typekit Web Fonts
I’m also using Typekit to stylize my blog with a Frank Lloyd Wright–inspiredfont. I chose this font because: Read the rest of this entry
The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com (via United Stage)
For those who are in their TypeKit Editor and just want to know the CSS selectors used in the Twenty Ten theme, I am sharing this list compiled by David W. Boles. Thank you very much, David!
content, body, p, h3#comments-title, h3#reply-title, #access .menu, #access div.menu ul, #cancel-comment-reply-link, .form-allowed-tags, #site-info, #site-title, #wp-calendar, .comment-meta, .comment-body tr th, .comment-body thead th, .entry-content label, .entry-content tr th, .entry-content thead th, .entry-meta, .entry-title, .entry-utility, #respond label, .navigation, .page-title, .pingback p, .reply, .widget-title, .wp-caption-text, input[type="submit"], #access .menu-header, div.menu, #colophon, #branding, #main, #wrapper, blockquote, blockquote cite, blockquote em, blockquote i, body, input, textarea, .page-title span, .pingback a.url, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6
via United Stage
Why I’m not using Typekit Fonts yet
I tried installing Typekit fonts on this blog, and I almost gave up because the complexity of it reminded me of why I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com. I suppose it would have been easier if Typekit had built-in support for the Twenty Ten theme, but when I tried it a couple of weeks ago, they didn’t. So I had to open one of my blog pages in Safari, select Develop from the menu (because I installed the optional developer tools), select Show Web Inspector, and study the CSS to suss out what the “selectors” were for the masthead and other sections of the pages I wanted to set the new fonts to. Even knowing CSS, it took some searching through the code to see what was styling what, since Classes and IDs are arbitrarily created by each CSS author.
Once I found the Classes and IDs, I had to go back to the Typekit editor (which always took a long time to load, as did everything else on the Typekit site) and manually enter the “selectors” I wanted to apply the fonts to. I found that I had to do it with periods in front rather than hashmarks, or maybe it was the other way around— I would have to be writing CSS on a regular basis to get it right, and who does? (If you do, then you wouldn’t find it complicated at all, but then you might as well have a WordPress.org site and not a WordPress.com site, eh?)
I break for descenders
Notice anything interesting about the sentence in this screenshot? Yes, it contains every letter in the English latin alphabet. Incidentally, it is set in Lucida Grande regular typeface. But what’s interesting about it, to me, is how the underlining breaks around the descenders— those tails of the letters q, j, p, y, and g that "descend" below the baseline.
I learned a long time ago that professional typography calls for minimal use of underlining, and when you must underline, you should place the underlines by hand so that they break before and after descenders. That way, you don’t get aesthetically displeasing line crossings on the letters.
What I didn’t know was that Mac OS X’s TextEdit program automatically breaks underlines before and after descenders. I don’t know when this feature was added, but I never noticed it before now. It’s great that there’s a program that automates the breaking of underlines so that they don’t cross descenders. It’s interesting to me that TextEdit — a program that comes with the Mac OS — does this, but Pages, a more advanced text editing and layout application, does not. I think it would be a good thing if Pages would offer all the features that TextEdit offers. Perhaps they will integrate Pages more with the Mac OS X font panel in the next version. I notice you can use the font panel to choose fonts and styles in Pages, but the underlining does not break around descenders in Pages the way it does in TextEdit— or MacJournal, for that matter, which integrates with the Font Panel as well as TextEdit does.
Am I missing something? Does Pages ’09 automatically break underlines around descenders? Are there other word processing programs that do? I would love to hear more about this from your experience.
