Monday, September 15, 2008

Wedges and Edths

As part of my continuing quest not to be the dumbest person ever, I started wondering how I might be able more easily to insert foreign characters* in here. When the Character Set would offer me selections in the default font (Arial) (which it turned out was not even the one the post font was set to) (Times) (but why would I know that? They came out with serifs on the blog!), I would have recourse to some that I needed, like E's both aigu and grave, but for C-cedille I needed to Google some Froggy or Turkic word that contained it, use an entry where the character was not in bold (because Blogger would retain that formatting, and I am not smart enough to know how to remove it when obvious steps do not), and then cut and paste it into the entry because the character set in that font does not have it except in majuscule which, despite my low standards, looks every bit as stupid in the middle of 'faÇade' as I think it does.

My solution, when cutting and pasting seemed too labourious, was to use a terminal sigma and call it done, as with faςade. You probably didn't even notice.

But what I don't understand is why different commonplace fonts would have differing selections of diacritics and/or languages' alphabets from others. (I.e., were there some definitive studies done showing that Courier users consistently need letters that Georgia fans do not?) Not to mention wondering why in Arial I can get access to a capital C-cedille, not to mention a Latin C with both an acute and a cedille and a 'Latin Small Letter Sideways Open O' but be barred from what seems to be a far more regularly used character than either of those? So now everything will be in Georgia (allegedly), wherein I can not only use C-cedilles as liberally as I please, but also toss in a few 'Greek Small Letter Iota with Dialytika and Tonos' when I want.

So here is a final goodbye to Final Sigma. You've been good to me, but just like the loden-green wedges the thieves stole 1/2 of from the car, you were never quite right, anyway. And leave off the hissing; it's unbecoming.

ςςςςςςςςςςςςςςςς.....

*By which I mean more of the sigmas-and-edths type and less the Louis-the-Fourteenth sort.

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