February 2011 – Shady Characters

An aside

February 21, 2011

I wanted to take a moment to say thank you for all of the tweets, blog posts and comments that have appeared since Shady Characters went live — I’m bowled over by the response! Thank you particularly to Christopher and Nicklas of Web Standardistas and Jean François Porchez for mentioning Shady Characters on their respective sites, to Dom Crayford for submitting it to Hacker News, and to Jon Tan and Mark Pilgrim for their tweets. I’ve read Mark and Jon’s writing in the past, so to be mentioned in their Twitter feeds is amazing.

The Pilcrow, part 1 of 3

February 20, 2011

This is a pilcrow: ¶. They crop up surprisingly frequently, bookending paragraphs on websites with a typographic bent, for instance, and teaming up with the section symbol in legal documents to form picturesque reference marks such as §3, ¶7. The pilcrow even appears in Microsoft Word, where it adorns a button which reveals hidden characters such as spaces and carriage returns. (Click on that button, in fact, and a multitude of pilcrows will appear, one at the end of each line of text.)