Typography errors don't bug me at all. When have we ever been able to type these into web forms like this comment box? Never!

I agree with @downstairs. Online/digital text should be treated differently than print.

Poor grammar bugs me the most... then/than your/you're are the two that really make me wince. I even registered [thenthan.com] because of it!

envador

It shouldn't even be used mathematically to represent a minus, as there's a dedicated character for that, too

OK, what I call the "dash" shares a key on the upper right of my keyboard with the "underscore." So where is teh minus sign, I mean the minus sign, dammit?

bradnh

Strunk & White have a posse.

rscotta

Improper spelling of lose/loose and their/thier is an obvious sign of a retard.

TPSreports

@bigvince1981: I just tried the keyboard shortcuts for hypens, and they indeed don't work with the hyphen key above 'P'.

Is there any easy way to make this work no a laptop, where there is no number keypad?

Scott Wegner

If everyone makes them then they are no longer mistakes.

TehBoj

Wow, that guy's unnecessarily anal.

tmweber

The keyboard shortcuts for em and en dashes use the number keypad hyphen, unless you set up custom keyboard shortcuts.

en dash: ctrl + numpad hyphen
em dash: ctrl + alt + numpad hyphen

bigvince1981

These are the same kinds of "mistakes" as splitting the infinitive and avoiding blatant constructions.

DaoKaioshin

Autocorrect, baby. In my WP programs I have all my transpositions fixed automatically: "unviersity" to "university," "teh" to "the," etc.

Hermagoras

@Chris: Aw come on, grammar is so 20th century! Typography errors are the new hotness. Coming up next: typos in your text message shorthand, OGM WFT DYI!

@downstairs: correctly specified character sets should resolve any incompatibilities; I just use UTF-8 for everything. As long as you always explicitly specify which set you're using, it should work fine. (I publish a lot of XML-formatted physics material on the web, which usually contains subscripts, quotes, greek characters, etc., so I'm familiar with the dreaded ? symbols in web browsers!)

monster79

Not sure if many of these typos are all that relevant (except for the hyphen bit, that was useful).

I'd much rather focus on correct usage of "its" and "it's", "there, their, and they're" for example, instead of which direction my quotation mark is facing.

Chris

Secondly, and this is a BIG pet peeve... special characters are only appropriate for things going to print (desktop publishing, Word docs to be printed).

With anything digital, special characters often come out funky, not at all, or can completely screw up certain things like XML feeds, etc.

So, sorry... no curly quotes, no emdashes, just stop it!

downstairs

On every keyboard I know of, the minus is the same as the dash.

ASCII character 45.

downstairs

I'll get this one out of teh way...

the / teh

JayDeEm

Oh my god, thank you SO MUCH for posting this - I've never before been able to find out how to properly render en/em dashes in word processing programs (even after many hours of googling!) and it has always driven me CRAZY to look at "dashes" that were really hyphens.

katielouise

Texan: Howdy. Where're you from?
Hoity-Toity University Graduate: I come from a place where we do NOT end our sentences with prepositions.
Texan: All right. Where're you from, jackass?

RelativeRon

Most typos I see are people getting the order of vowels wrong in words with consecutive vowels, or using the wrong vowel (then vs than). The first is easy to fix using spellcheck, the second isn't so straightforward.

On my XGA screen I can't tell the difference between em, en or normal dash, or any other dash you use. I don't use the long dash in Microsoft Word either - it fixes itself as it sees fit. So don't even bother; I won't notice ;)

Some of them can't be helped; you don't always have access to the straight-and-90-degree x instead of the letter "x" for math, for instance.

I guess most of those tips are for professional typographers for whom such differences matter; journal editors and publishers, for instance. The rest of us laypeople can just read and ignore.

For me, typography is about making it look good, not about whether you're using the right Unicode character or not. Straight quotes or slanted quotes, who cares? If it looks good it's fine. In most cases using the right character makes a world of difference in looks, but sometimes it doesn't, so for normal web usage just let those sleeping dogs lie.

When it comes to symbols and punctuation I do have a pet peeve: abuse of superscript and subscript. I know of professors who still have no idea how to use equation editor (from MSWord) or LaTEX, and insist on writing all their equations in text. And because of that you sometimes see weird things, like a superscript-zero in place of a proper degree-symbol. It's very noticeable and very unsightly.

kureshii

körte szilva

keki

alma

korte

keki

That explains it...apparently it's a *Mac* thing. Maybe he should be more concerned with the content of his text rather that the presentation of it??

edmicman

alma

körte

keki

alalalalal

keki

@TPSreports: Which is why I made [losetheloose.bluewavedigital.net]

Though, some of these do seem a bit on the techical OCD side...

ocdude

dasdsadasd

keki

@tmweber: The article doesn't really lambaste anyone for making these "mistakes." It just offers up suggestions for more readable formatting. Using ASCII codes and HTML tags is a little more work than "implying" characters with straight text (I usually don't write out my name as André), but putting in the extra effort does help readers out, and often makes your content more likely to be read.

Andre Kibbe

@TehBoj: TRUTH.

tofoomeister

It annoys me to no end when "intelligent" people use "then" instead of "than", as in "ten more then last year". I'm talking doctors, nurses, and policymakers who proudly display big f-off diplomas from prestigious colleges and universities...
Me? I don't make mistakes, and I went to a good-old public university.

RenRen

"Changing fashions mean the the long dash - this one, called a..."

The The? I love grammar Nazis that make grammatical errors :) Brightens my day.

brandonmartinez

My biggest typo is when I have a capital letter followed by the letter a. My coordination is sometimes off and I capitalize the a. For example, my name is Gabe, but I usually hit the keys so quickly I end up with GAbe. Drives me nuts and I'm the one doing it.

gforster

@Posco Grubb: I absolutely agree.
Someone who is really particular about typesetting could also use latex that has all the symbols that the author was griping about.

shankar

@TPSreports: I know! I nearly loose my mind when I see there mistakes!

/No. I could not resist, why do you ask?

Peeved Guy

Sheesh. This whole article brings new meaning to the word "anal".

Seriously, stop worrying that the hyphen should be a 2-pixel-shorter en-dash--just type your damn message and get on with your life.

HeartBurnKid

I use auto-correct too, and my typing would be pretty sorry without it. But there's one mistake I make all the time that it can't catch. When I'm typing the word "the," I transpose the space bar and the E key, so the E winds up starting the next word. "I went down th estairs into th ebasement." I'm always having to back up and fix it.

What do people use for system-wide auto-correct? I use an old PC Magazine utility called RoboType, and a freebie called Let Me Type for text completion.

jimdoria

I remember learning in my high school typing class that a dash was represented by a space, followed by two hyphens, followed by another space.

zkam

I would say these are for professional typographers and those interested in the field only, not us mere mortals

nestorius

You know what I hate? When people say "I would of done X" instead of I would have done X." Just because it sounds the same functionally, doesn't mean you can just go around changing words and making your own language!

EllisWords

"Avoid ten typos that only professional typesetters would even know about."

I'm a little bit sceptical that wasting time trying to figure out how to satisfy goofy typographical vagaries to satisfy a few pedants qualifies as a "life hack." Going to the character map to make sure you use the correct prime character and the correct cross-product character when your meaning is perfectly clear WITHOUT the use of bucky bits.

Troy F.

English is ambiguous sometimes. It seems that the linked post is talking about problems in typesetting, which is a bit more formal than your casual blog- or comment-writing. Ultimately, typesetting is for readability and beauty. Thus, the use of special quotes and so forth. I even didn't know that there were special characters for tick marks (prime and double prime) for use with foot-inch measurements. Unfortunately, we use the word "typo" to also signify spelling errors, which are, technically, not typesetting or typographical errors; they're just spelling errors.

So, I would say, most of these "mistakes" everyone makes don't matter that much unless you are producing a lengthy formal document such as a printed book or an e-book that will be sold for money. In that case, you should afford to hire a copy editor.

Posco Grubb

@EllisWords: Actually, they're saying: "I would've done X," which doesn't involve making up any new languages as far as I'm aware. It's just a contraction.

My personal pet peeves are less v. fewer and the misuse of "simplistic."

I'd like to second (third? Sixth?) the comments regarding the typographical corrections being a bit on the anal-retentive side, though...

Wit

@chrishad95: Thanks for that link. My wife does that and it drives me batty. I was beginning to doubt myself.

Peeved Guy

"A lot". Not 'alot'. That is all.

Eclectified

I love this stuff. Of course, it's only appropriate for word processing or typesetting. I don't think the author intended that we should be using em-dashes and interpuncts (?!) in blogs and emails. But for anything as "professional" as, say, a resume, or above, these kinds of details are great to know.

Rhywun

Oh so many good comments... where to start?

@Chris: et al. AGREED!!! The internet and especially forums are like the Thai brothels of bad grammar. Seriously, I'm not talking about making a typing mistake occasionally, but about negligent use of your primary language. Their / They're / There, etc., aren't that difficult and whether you think these things matter or not, many people you'll interact with think they do matter! Nothing will have someone stop from caring about what you're saying more quickly than making a mistake like this.

@TehBoj: Wrong. If everyone shot themselves in the head, that'd still be wrong. Yes, yes yes, grammar is slightly different, but this is a dangerous method of argument.

I tend to misspell words and mix up "I" and "me." But the first step is knowing and trying to change.

How about a list like this: [blogs.techrepublic.com.com] ?

ACF

"Eyes catch only what mind knows."

dannielo

I favor correct grammar as much--or more--than the next guy (having been an English major), but these are typographic issues, and since most of my typing involves plain text, this really has little to do with grammar, because with plain text you have fudge things a bit. (Wow... all in one sentence... "typos" and all.)

GlennA

Minus, dash, long dash, and the really long sentence joining dash ... all brought to you painlessly via TeX. Nice control of quote types and \times symbol, use $^\circ$ for degrees, and, well, basically all the problems are neatly taken care of via TeX.

tigerhawkvok

The one that drives me nuts is when people use I and me in the wrong places.

Example:
Mother bought ice cream for my brother and I.

More about this at the most excellent English Errors site:
[www.wsu.edu]

chrishad95

People, people! This tip is not about spelling errors or grammar mistakes!

If you want to point out your pet peeve grammar mistake (then vs than, its vs it's, would of if I could've), please comment elsewhere.

For the rest of us non-typesetter types who want beautifully typeset documents without hiring a typographer: the best tip is Forget about Word Processors. Pick up LaTeX or troff.

Posco Grubb

Interesting read.
But, nobody cares...
(Yes, those are just three periods.)

joe23521

@Peeved Guy:
I feel your pain. My wife is the main culprit in my life.

chrishad95

@zkam:
That's old school ... and using a typewriter. At a recent seminar, I was told that it's not longer proper to put two spaces after a period, to which the entire class balked!

brain-dead-idiot

@ Scott Wegner

If you're using MS Word, you can enter an em dash using your laptop by using this method: ALT + 0151. An en dash can be entered using ALT + 0150. For more alternate (re: laptop) shortcuts, go here: Computing With Foreign Symbols.

Also, it would be nice if people would use the proper delineation between years or anything that indicates from point A to Point Z. If you're trying to indicate that something occurred between the years of 1981 and 1997, you do not use a dash, but rather you should use an en dash. This indicates that there is a length between the data.

brain-dead-idiot

@brandonmartinez:
This appears to be a problem with the Lifehacker site – it shows up properly on the original page.

lwandlu

I love to use LaTeX (well, LyX, usually) and InDesign when warranted, but sometimes I want nice type in an environment not usually designed for typography, like Notepad or a Firefox text box.

Mac users have the Alt key, which helps out a lot. If you are using Linux or Unix you can easily access most of these special characters with the similar "Compose key," which is usually Ctrl or Alt if there is no dedicated key. In Windows, you can simulate a compose key with AllChars (allchars.zwolnet.com). So for example

Compose m - => — (em-dash)
Compose 1 2 => ½
Compose d g => °
Compose . . => ·
Compose x x => ×

You can get more unusual fractions, too, if your typeface supports them (at least version 5 of AllChars):

Compose 2 5 => ⅖

You can even build up some crazy fractions yourself:

Compose . 3 Compose . 1 Compose . / Compose _ 3 Compose _ 2 => ³¹⁄₃₂

Fun!

lwandlu

Terrible grammar drives me crazy. My biggest peeves:

1. Improper use of good vs well:
"How was your meeting with the new client yesterday?"
It went well!
(Never "It went good")

2. Misuse of pronouns:
Call me and Bob to set up a meeting.
(Never "Call Bob and I to set up a meeting")

Bob and I went to the store yesterday.
(Never "Bob and me went to the store")

3. To, too and two are three different words. Do not use them interchangeably.

mereditherin

LOL I did a post on my blog about typos too, but it was in February.

[jeda21.blogspot.com]

jeda21

@Chris: your so right. I agree with you to much.

jswilson64

There's nothing wrong with the article; it's just that typesetting isn't relevant to most LH readers.

That_Bastid

My personal bugaboo: In my job, we deal with patents, and there is a shorthand way of referring to a patent in which Patent No. 9,999,999 becomes the '999 patent. In a serif font like TNR, if you type an apostrophe before your text, Word helpfully places a left single quotation mark instead of an apostrophe. I have found no way of overriding this. My fix thus far as been to do a rather complex set of search-and-replace operations as part of finalizing every document.

I would love it if someone had a better idea!

Hey, teh, some of us don't have any choice but to use Word. :)

TexasBelle

*sigh* If you really cared about typographical errors you would not be composing documents in Word; there are wonderful typesetting programs (e.g. LaTeX) that do a much better job.

teh

umm i consider myself something of a grammarian, but getting picky about dashes? if I were to handwrite hyphen vs ndash, *no one* would know the difference...

Jabapyth

@brain-dead-idiot:
Yay! I'm so glad someone knew that shortcut. :) If you are using a Mac, the en dash is option+hyphen and the em dash is option+shift+hyphen.

And yes, anyone who cares about this kind of stuff in casual writing (web comments, emails, etc.) or about perfect grammar in speech is ridiculous. You will look like a fool if you get this stuff wrong on a resume or in professional writing though.

One last note: The article is wrong, at least if you follow Chicago style. Em dashes are used as shown, but en dashes are only used for number ranges and some other special uses. They aren't interchangeable with em dashes as the article implies. I don't know about other styles, but I've never seen en dashes used in place of em dashes.

Beki

Or you could submit your post to [quickpostedit.com] for a quick review. That is the site I use before posting on my blog.

symtex411

These are professional typesetting mistakes, not common typos.

"should be 10.5″ × 9.4″ × 4.5″, not 10.5″ x 9.4″ x 4.5″."

I stared at this line for like 2 minutes before I saw any difference.

poekicker

In MS Office programs, you can make things easier on yourself if you find yourself inserting special characters often. I use PowerPoint all the time, and I got tired of the other methods of inserting special characters (trying to remember the Alt+XXXX character number or opening character map) and I added some commands to my "AutoCorrect Options" under the Tools menu:

For instance, any time I type (-), PowerPoint changes it to an en dash, and whenever I type (--), it gets automatically changed to an em dash. You can do this with whatever characters (or words) you frequently use. I also type (c), which gets changed into a copyright symbol, and (tm)...well you get the idea.

I added these in PowerPoint, and I just opened Word, and they show up there too, so this must work across all the Office suite of software...

Of course, you can also use your AutoCorrect options in other ways too--I have it set to capitalize FTP and OK and other things that are in all caps.

I am on a Windows computer, but I assume there are AutoCorrect options in the Mac version also.

By the way, this is the magical place where all those "teh" = "the" fixes are stored too.

harshmellow

I understand the writer is just venting a little bit about their pet peeves but I really don't think any of these mistakes matter. The purpose of language is to convey meaning and I don't think anyone is confused by these "mistakes" or that by correcting them it makes the meaning more clear. In my opinion we would be better off if we just ignored this kind of thing all together.

skatanic

The sad part is the poster misusing hyphens. As used in context, the most correct way to refer to "ready-made" is by putting in it quotes to make it clear that he is referring to the word itself. Failing that, in that context it actually should not have been hyphenated. Words should only be hyphenated together when they are used as a noun modifier, and not when used in a standalone fashion.

The ready-to-assemble furniture is, indeed, ready to assemble.

Sorry to get all pedantic on y'all, but if someone's going to try to correct people for using straight quotes instead of slanted inch marks, it seems appropriate. However, yay for slapping people around for using upside-down quotes in dates. That's just painful to look at.

strangeweather

@RenRen: I'm willing to forgive a doctor for bad grammar as long as he's good at the doctor stuff.

Kryptoknight

I wonder if there's a seamless app that makes special characters as easy to enter on Windows as it is for Mac: I've taken Opt-2 to do the trademark symbol for too long, and all those Alt-keypresses in Windows are kludgey and annoying.

I suppose I could set them up one-by-one in PhraseExpress, like how I have a macro setup to turn "(r)" into ®, but aside from my most-used ones, that'd be tedious.

Torley

Christ, aside from the bracket/parenthesis thing, he sounds like a pedantic text-layout geek that doesn't get that those things do no translate to the web, where you can't even begin to assume that your users (or your CMS, really), can handle special characters.

I'll stick with technically-incorrect-but-properly-rendered characters, thanks.

xboxishuge

Ladie's room.

That is all.

ChuckECheese

For those who are wondering, the minus sign is conveniently located in the numeric keypad portion of your keyboard. :)

Johnay

I'm more worried about the fact that I used "hence" twice in the same sentence.

Marc

@ACF: Grammar isn't "slightly" different from a bullet. These are social conventions we're talking about. In particular, although it is important to have SOME convention here, one convention is more or less as good as another. Hence, if everyone makes the same typographical mistake, then that's the new convention, and hence not a mistake.

Marc

@RenRen: In total agreement - but I also fume when people of regular intelligence write as if they aren't. I don't mind slang (FWIW), but only if it make sense (and 'emails,' kids, is an unsound creation).

My new policy is to immediately stop reading when people stop writing: I haven't time in the day to continue reading gibberish, or 'nubespek'. Right now I count the second blatantly stupid bit of gibberish as the end of writing, and as the signal to stop.

Examples include:
- Friggen, or any time when an abject moron shortens 'ing' to 'en'.
- emails, datas, traffics, deers or similarly inspired mispluralization.
- WUT? LOL!1! R U 4RL? Curse T9 for removing your last excuse. Come out of the 90s and use real words!

I've become far less stressed as a result, and I like to think the average quality of the thoughts I take in has also improved.

lunchbox

@Johnay: unless you're using most laptops (sans one of those fancy USB keypads).

If you're writing an article for IEEE or some kind of literary journal, than use tex and render as dvi. If you're writing a memo, a web-post, a letter to your senator, a novel, an encyclopedia, a screen play, a suicide note, a love note, a screen play,...use your word processor of choice and the characters available with one or two keystrokes, and call it a day. I mean really, if the meaning is clear and the usage is fairly common then does it really matter?

On the other hand, I guess that attitude is how we end up with a population who can't remember the different between your and you're, there, their and there, and its and it's, all of which bug the hell out of me.

bmearns

@ChuckECheese: What, Ladie can't have her own room?

That said, here's my personal LifeHack: ignore these "corrections". Don't spend time worrying about stuff no one will notice and which doesn't alter clarity, meaning, or intent. Unless and until, of course, I become a professional typesetter.

witeowl

Actually, the em dash is what you use everywhere. It can replace most other punctuation - just use it if you want to change topic mid-sentence.

For the "everything needs an en dash" and they give one of the only examples you DO use an en dash. You only use an en dash when you are specifying a range of numbers. The other is if you're using a compound adjective of more than one word. Pro-Apple gets a hyphen. Pro-open source gets the en dash.

/note that I did use proper dashes, the post just doesn't post them.

alt-0151 being an em dash
alt-0150 being an en dash

homerj

I don't get this post at all. Alt-hyphen and alt-shift-hyphen do absolutely nothing at all on my machine.

torrentlover

Interesting for those who do professional typesetting. But surely those people know this already?

Perhaps in our blog-happy, tech-laden, globalized world it might be more of a Lifehack to come up with an easy way to type €500, 100º, onomatopœia, and (especially) This work is ©. Surely this sort of hack would be of more use for the sort of daily electronic communication that so many of us do?

vroddrew

Languages change. Typographical conventions change.

If (almost) everyone makes these "mistakes", I'd say the changes have already occurred.

robdew

@robdew: Yeah you got there before me. First item in the linked article:

"The mistake happens because typewriters, pushed for space, decided to have only one neutral quote on the keyboard, not dedicated opening and closing quotes, and the convention stuck."

So, in other words there's a new convention and everyone's using it. Sorry, change happens. Live with it.

Besides, it's already a nightmare moving between different language keyboards - I do sys admin and support for an international company, meaning that on any given day I might look at UK, US, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian and German keyboards all with special characters (and letters and numbers) in different places. We don't need different kinds of quote marks and additional special characters complicating things further when we can (and have) agree on a neutral compromise that pleases everyone (except the supremely anal writer linked to in the article).

aphexbr

@TexasBelle: I usually just press apostrophe twice, which gives both styles (left and right apostrophe), then type the word, before going back to delete the unwanted character. Still troublesome but I don't find myself needing it often.

@Eclectified: That's one of the few tips MSWord managed to teach me ;)

kureshii

I always make Os after the 1st letter capitals. BOok, DOor, COmbine, etc..

As my name is TOm its really frustrating...

soul_grind

While we're on our grammar pet peeves, I'd like to point out: The element on the periodic table found in Chinese baby toys is "lead". The past tense of the verb "to lead" is "led".

As in "Harvey led his bowling league with the most strikes."

SundaySundayFnC

IMO, not typing two spaces after a period is a more important typo to focus on for everyday computer users than the myriad of short dashes because it actually appears in many touch-type training programs as the "correct" way of doing things!

It's a hold-over from the days of typewriters and monospace fonts, and today it's not necessary for variable-width typefaces. Actually, the gaps it creates break up the flow of body copy, especially in justified text.

SpaceCat85

Well, if everyone is going to nit-pick, why don't people stop using fonts like Times New Roman, which is left over from the days of newspaper publishing and ugly as hell, and start using a font you can read, like Georgia? :)

WhereForArt

Missing from this is that not all hyphenated/dashed sentences use two dashes. It's required for parentheses and braces - even quotes, but not for every dash.

@SundaySundayFnC: And the element Al is spelled (and pronounced) aluminium, like the British pronunciation. Aluminum is an Americanism for the metal products made from aluminium (e,g, soda cans).

@Torley: I'm a full-fledged (is that a minus or an en? Or an em?) Fanboy now, but I miss the Alt/number pad for extended characters. There is a basic set of about ten that I used - especially superscript - that I memorized.

It's taking me a while (4 years) but I've memorized a few of the option/shift/key combos for the Mac. I've got the ™, ®, and © down cold. But I still find the Alt/numbers much more logical and intuitive (they seem to be loosely grouped).

You can always create a sticky note widget with the full set of characters and just do a quick copy and paste.

Okay class, tomorrow we'll cover nested quotation marks.

imajoebob

Very interesting article. It won't change my typing habits but it is still interesting.

jccalhoun

I don't understand why we need four dash characters that are indistinguishable to almost everyone. The em dash is clearly something different, but I vote we consolidate all the others. What's the point? I say even the typesetters should join us in the consolidation.

As for joining sentences, I'd like to see spaces always used on either side of whichever dash people use. I get thrown off in certain cases because I think the writer is trying to join two words, and I stumble over it a few times trying to make it make sense before I realize they were joining two sentences instead. I say anything that makes reading more difficult shouldn't be retained. Let's kill all dashes but one, whatever its width, and say that you always use spaces around it unless you mean to join two words or do something like 1-2.

I feel the same about the quote marks and their unloved cousins. I think that any time you see a pair of them hanging in the air, you know what they mean regardless of whether they are slanty, curly, or straight. I say consolidate and simplify. Let's just have one set of versatile straights to be used in any of those cases.

I vote for the Oxford comma. With consistent use, you will never be confused or have to guess about which things belong together in a set.

The stubborn two-spaces-after-a-sentence habit vexes me. It just won't die. I write reports regularly for work, each of which has to go through an editor before going to the client. I get them all back with tracked changes. All of them come back with all of my single spaces having been changed to doubles. I finally gave up and now send them in with doubles. I type it my way and then do a couple of macros that change them before I send them out. No amount of explaining their uselessness will sway the editors. They don't want to hear about monospace and all that. Grr!

@imajoebob - both spellings of the element aluminum/aluminium are correct. It just depends on where you live. Bill Bryson explains the word's troubled history in his book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything". Humphry Davy, the Brit who discovered the element, originally named it "alumium". No n to be found. This matched the "-ium" form of many other elements that were being named. For whatever reason, he later changed it himself to aluminum and that's how everyone spelled it. In the USA, that spelling stuck and has never looked back. Later on in the UK, however, scientists decided they didn't like the way it violated the "-ium" pattern, so they stuck an additional i in there to bring it in line with all of the others. They could have just dropped the n too, I suppose. So aluminum can claim oldest bloodline, and aluminium can claim cleaner lines. But neither can be considered incorrect when used on its home turf. I believe the stuff about the element vs. its alloys or products made with it is either urban legend or a convention that set in later. Or both. But Brits are responsible for all three of the spellings that have ever been used for this element.

kookoobirdz

Huh ya know I don't really care 'cause the way I see it language is an evolving thing who get's to decide that this type of horizontal line goes here but this length horizontal line goes here.
Furthermore his fixes don't work in windows becuase if you press the alt key you access the keyboard shortcuts to the menu go ahead you know you want to hit "alt f" and file menu pops open.
So to the 98% of web users don't even bother reading this article it is both poitless and useless. However if you are a stuck-up mac user this is right up your alley.

mattbatt

I'm humming along fine in Windows thanks to my new AutoHotKey script. See my comment at the original blog post for details:

[www.haloscan.com]

It's version 1.0, so feel free to let me know any corrections you come up with.

sophware

Many of these are actually only possible after the introduction of Unicode, which is actually not that long ago (compared to the time that typewriters and computers have existed).

And I think we shouldn't really be bothered, especially on the Internet for comments like this. If you're printing a big poster (where the different quotes might be very obvious) then the story might be different.

In my opinion the main thing is to be consistent. It irritates me if someone uses the "66" quote and then the straight quote on the same page.

If these were really so important then word processors should handle this automatically. I know that word already handles the 'sixty-six and ninety-nine' quotes, feet and inches quotes, some of the dashes, the ellipsis and the fractions issue.

For the measurement I use the equations tool in word. This would be hard to correct in word processors as the x might also mean variable x (that, however, should be italicized).

The degrees symbol can be found in word's insert -> symbol command (or use character map and search for degree).

For the New in iWork '08! problem word processors should just check if there is a space before the quote and use the right one.

And for the decimal issue, my math textbook when I was much younger used the . for decimals, but when I checked the previous edition the · was used.

kaiyao

Hey, forget those. My mom regularly uses an apostrophe where she wants a comma, and vice versa.

dondiego87

@kureshii: Yep, that's my fix, too. It gets to be a pain when you do it 87 times a day. Plus it doesn't help when I have to edit other people's writing. Sometimes I think I just need to learn Visual Basic already.

TexasBelle

none of those alt-hyphen or alt-] entries work. what app/OS does that apply to? macs? psh. alt-129 for the umlat ü

elislider

@TPSreports:

With lose/loose, their/there/they're and affect/effect it isn't that people spell them incorrectly, they just don't know the basic grammar and which one to choose.

Still, I did like the guys at work who kept reporting the rouge network device...

ajft

Does anyone seriously care about this? The quotes are pointing the wrong way? Seriously!?

I don't think I would have noticed or cared about any of the things he brought up.

aikoto

@WhereForArt: serif fonts are easier on the eyes compared to sans serif. and crap fonts like 'symbol' may look pretty, but can take a while to decipher, depending on size. also, have you noticed most people these days cannot write in cursive to save their lives? even print seems to be too difficult for anyone these days.

Collaboratory

@TPSreports: i beg to differ since i know highly intelligent individuals who cannot spell to save their lives. luckily, they proofread.

Collaboratory

To all you people complaining that typographical conventions don't matter: I know nobody reads print any more but I dare say if you were forced to read a book that looked like it was typeset in Notepad you'd soon complain that is was not only ugly but difficult to read. The conventions, developed over hundreds of years, are there for a reason.

Rhywun

@RenRen: For all intensive purposes! -g

Outtacontext

@Rhywun: ..and yet, at the same time, these can't be "typography mistakes most people make" because most people don't do typography in the first place. It's like writing "these are 10 mistakes (almost) everybody makes when setting the table" when, to my knowledge, most people don't have proper place settings in mind for dinner time.

I would hope people focus on fixing things like grammar and spelling, which along with the above analogy would be like fixing things like eating cereal with a knife and using spoons to carve a turkey - painful and laborious to deal with.

Chef

I personally thought this was one of the silliest articles I've read yet on LifeHacker. One might call me a "grammar nazi" but the things they point out here are absolutely ridiculous (and don't even relate to "being on top of your grammar"). It's pretty much impossible to be able to spot these things in real life. If you do make one of these "typos" I'm fairly certain that 99.9% of the people who read it won't notice or care.

dealmaster00

I can;t seem to stop hitting ; instead of '

erydan

@brain-dead-idiot and zkam

You use two spaces on a typewriter because it's a nonproportional font. All the characters are the same width, so the extra space helps the eye to find the end of a sentence. However, because most people these days are typing in Arial or Times New Roman (etc.), both of which are proportional fonts, one space after the period is sufficient. If you're using plain text, which is often rendered in Courier, two spaces is still OK.

@beki

I agree. No style guide that I know of confuses n- and m-dashes. Off the top of my head, I know for sure that the AMA Manual of Style and the Council of Science Editors Style Manual distinguish between the two.

Also, his bit about brackets and parentheses is just plain wrong. They're interchangable depending on the style of the publication, and neither is "better" than the other.

As a copyeditor (the word is often closed up now, no space), one of my pet peeves is printers, typographers, and graphic designers who think because they know about fonts, they know about punctuation. ;)

cyraxote