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  • Hacker News
  • Nice reference – thanks for the post!
    by monocultured
  • I'm turning on cancel culture, no russian reading
    by gitowiec
  • Original title:

    Manual: •.,:;…!?·

    (Except printed in a really cool font!)

    by andai
  • > The period is used as a decimal symbol in English language — as well as in the language of former British colonies, in China, Japan, and some other countries.

    This one, as a native french speaker, is the bane of my existence since I started using computers 42 years ago.

    To me having the period/dot as the decimal symbol simply makes sense and I see both the period/dot and the comma as valid decimal symbols. And I really wish I could say: "either period/dot or comma as the decimal symbol, and NEVER EVER any separator for thousands/millions, etc.".

    Because both:

        12.48
    and

        12,48
    do make sense.

    While either:

       1,000,000.77
    or:

       1.000.000,77
    are DUMBFUCKTARDED notations.

    And I'm not alone in thinking that:

    "The 22nd General Conference on Weights and Measures[27] declared in 2003, "The symbol for the decimal marker shall be either the point on the line or the comma on the line." It further reaffirmed,[27]

    Numbers may be divided in groups of three in order to facilitate reading; neither dots nor commas are ever inserted in the spaces between groups

    That is, "1 000 000 000" is preferred over "1,000,000,000" or "1.000.000.000". This use has therefore been recommended by technical organizations, such as the United States's National Institute of Standards and Technology."

    But because sooooo many software still use those dumbfucktarded notations where pointless separators are used to needlessly separate groups, it's not possible to say:

    "either dot/period/comma is the decimal separator"

    Wanna talk about co-workers having different locales and online spreadsheet with numbers looking different? What about a spreadsheet where on one computer a formula begins with:

        =SUM(...
    while on another computer, on the same desk, that freaking same formula is:

        =SOMME(...
    This is facepalming retardation on a level of fucktardedness that cannot be understated.
    by TacticalCoder
  • Agreed. I've started to use space now as the decimal separator and trying to spread the gospel.
    by qingcharles
  • in German, the period marks ordinal numbers

      das 2. Mal = the 2nd time
    by croisillon
  • In Hungarian, too. Most likely due to German influence.
    by marton78
  • > According to GOST technical standards, Russian language uses the semicolon to denote time:

    Is it correct that Russian officially uses a semicolon (;) to separate time elements, or is this just a translation error?

    > : (semicolon) for separating the elements of the time of the day (‘day’, ‘minute’, ‘minute and second’);

    The example right below it seems to make clear that it's just an error, but then I wondered if the use of a regular colon (:) there was somehow the error instead.

    by nkurz
  • Linux:

    Compose key, period, period = ellipsis …

    Compose key, period, equals = bullet •

    Compose key, period, minus = interpunct ·

    Compose key, !, ? = interrobang ‽

    by Grom_PE
  • Windows needs to just adopt this rather than punish users with the alt codes. Compose key is so much better than dicking around with an IME or dead keys.
    by kevin_thibedeau
  • Садись. Двойка! - "Sit down, you got an F" :) - sorry, as bulgarian it was funny to me this used as example (from russian).
    by malkia
  • "Садись, два» is more idiomatic
    by d0mine
  • There’s a quick note about the interrobang (‽) at the end. I’ve long had it in my macOS/iOS text replacement config, but nearly every font renders it so poorly that I usually manually retype the characters. It looks like a typographical mistake more often than communicating the questioned surprise that’s intended.

    There was a push a few years ago by some modern fonts (as illustrated in the article) to place the overlapping exclamation and question mark at a 30-45° from each other while sharing the same dot below, which is a huge improvement, but I doubt older fonts will ever be updated.

    by jonhohle
  • This article was the first time I saw that variation of the interrobang with the ! and ? angled and sharing the dot, but… man… I think I am in love‽
    by black_knight
  • Somehow it is always Russian technologists and designers who sweat this type of stuff the most and want to talk about it. When I moved from Russia to a western country in my teenage years, as a fledging web developer and previously an avid Kovodstvo [1] reader, I remember feeling upset, surprised, and deeply disappointed by the state of the real-world English language - particularly when it came to punctuation. It shocked me to see how loose and vibe-y it was, even in professional contexts. Nowadays, I understand that the majority of the world’s population has a much more casual relationship with the formal rules of their language, if those exist at all, compared to the hyper-pedantic Russians. I’m not one to say who really should be learning from whom.

    1: https://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/

    by firstbabylonian
  • I do not mean this to be lessen the craft of typography (which I am certain that it is!): For me, typography/styling beyond the very basics of bold, underline, italics and so on feels a bit like an aquired taste. Whenever I engage with related contend, I hear claims being made like "A helps to convey X", or "B and C should not mix, else Y!" - and I don't doubt that these claims are true, but I wonder if they are true for a selected few who pay attention to such things, or to statistically average person. My gut feeling would be that there are handful of claims that provably help get a message/intention across to a big group of people due to a mix of convention and how our brain processes what it sees - and at least 3/4 of claims that would not show such effect.

    One proxy to try to answer this question would be to look at what successfull advertisements use (not necessarily the ones that win prices, but the ones that drive up sales). Their advertisment media might have other qualities that might offset typography/styling sins, but they are more likely to be intentional about using typography/styling to get their point across.

    by dev_dan_2
  • > I’m not one to say who really should be learning from whom.

    We can learn from both!

    We can appreciate the intuitiveness of languages with looser grammar, and the rational elegance of stricter languages. And then there’s French :)

    by kergonath
  • I personally think that it's just fun and “in the spirit” of writing to be pedantic about it and typographically expressive in general. In many ways, writing is a very creative process, because it involves “fixating thoughts”, making something very analogue into something almost (but not completely) discrete; it's akin to graphic design in general in my eyes. And when I can bring some extra flavour to it – by sticking to pedantic rules, using rare typographic marks that have a meaning that's more historical now, or anything else – I tend to do it, even if just for my own amusement.
    by floppyd
  • That's pretty funny, I had in some sense the opposite experience. Learning Russian, at the point where I got beyond the beginner stage, I was really put off by the intense prescriptivism. As you learn languages you also learn that they all have their own pet-peeves (usually functioning like class markers). But in Russian it's taken to a point where linguistic diversity is looked down (perhaps apart from specialized slang) even in informal conversations. This is probably also related to the fact that the language famously has very little dialectical variation, which is especially surprising given the size of the country where it originates from.
    by kmm
  • I’m not a typographic nut (though I care about it more than the average American), but one of the worst trends I’ve seen is to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark (). I’ve even seen Apple do it. It doesn’t help that the checkmark glyph is generally terrible, and at least on a Mac, the shortcut (⌥+V) exists for square root, and happens to be something a Windows user might accidentally find when transitioning to Mac key bindings while the checkmark requires either knowing true code point and how to enter that in or going to the Emoji & Symbols panel.

    For 99.9% of people, as long as the meaning is clear, they’ll never even register that the wrong code point, wrong symbol, or even wrong formatting was used. While I prefer correctness when possible, I’ve come to terms that others only care about communicating their intent.

    by jonhohle