Creating & Editing Macros In M/S Word

[In which I moan about the abysmal macro-recorder in M/S Office, and show how to create and edit a macro.]

I finished my previous article with a comment that I've long wanted to have a bit of a whinge about M/S Word's macro recorder. Before I do that, though, I suppose I'd better explain what a macro recorder is. Indeed, what a macro is, given the number of people I've run into who seem have no idea that such things exist. Not to mention the number who start to back away slowly from my apparent geekism if I actually start discussing the ins and outs of them!

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CSS Superscript & Subscript

Some time back, I posted an article on basic maths (well, okay, arithmetic) symbols and the correct way to present them in web pages. In the course of it, I mentioned that the <sup> and <sub> tags are the wrong way to give that nice fraction-y look to fractions. By which I mean nicer-looking than "29⁄2", for example. The fraction-slash, being smaller than the forward-slash, gets sort of hidden in the crush between the digits. It's worse in some fonts than others, but not really very pretty in any. Anyway, I mentioned in passing that it is possible to create the same effect with CSS, which won't affect the way a screen reader will present it to the user. Then, somewhat to my shame, I basically said "but I can't be bothered right now."

To be fair to myself, it would have been something of a digression. To be honest with myself, it was bloody lazy. And I'm the bleedin' king, or at least in direct line to the throne, of digressionism; that really shouldn't have been an issue.

So I'll make up for it now, by beginning the piece-proper with… a digression! Yay!

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Lights

[No graphics-files have been used in the making of this post.]

I don't know about you, but when I'm feeling poorly—as I have been the last couple o' days—my first choice is to curl up with a book. If the gawdimdyingitis is a variety which buggers up my attention span though, my next port of call is mucking about with silly stuff on the computer, just to see what happens. Which is how the subject of this post came about.

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Maths Symbols, And Why They Matter

Several of my posts on html have contained passing mentions of writing with screen-readers for the visually impaired in mind. This one's a bit more directly aimed at that subject, although using the right symbols for the right job is, I think, a good thing in its own right. Think of it, if you will, as something of a mildly consciousness-raising piece, coupled with a simple "how to" guide.

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Sloping Text

Okay, so here's an interesting effect. Sloping text.

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Prettifying Punctuation After Superscripts

One of my biggest problems with writing blog posts is often how to begin. So, taking a leaf from the late great Isaac Asimov, here's a bit of vaguely-related rambling…

Several years ago a friend of mine made up the medical condition, Anal Retention Syndrome; which is only really amusing because of the apt acronym. (Mind you, recursive acronyms can be even more fun. Take, for example, the operating system, GNU. Developed in response to UNIX—which had previously been open-source—being made proprietary, it was so named because "GNU's Not UNIX.") As a serious theory, I seem to recall that Anal Retention is at least mostly discredited, but by the common meaning of the term—the tendency to become overly obsessed by trivialities—I have to hold my hand up and admit that, yes I do indeed suffer from ARS. Which probably goes a long way toward explaining this post and at least one other that's currently fermenting in my head…

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Embedding Custom Fonts In A Web page

Last night I ended my article on web-safe cursive fonts, saying that I'd post today explaining how to embed a custom font in a web page, such that all readers could see it, regardless of whether they have the font installed on their machine or not.

First though, a digression.

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The Problem Of Cursive Fonts (in which I defend—just a bit—Comic Sans)

Quite a while ago, a friend asked me if I could point them to a list of web-safe cursive fonts. Which should've been an easy ask, right? Couple o' minutes with Google, mail 'em a link or two, to pages displaying handy lists of same; job done. Erm, nope!

But before we go any further, let's just define, for the uninitiated, what the hell my friend's horribly geeky-looking question meant.

A cursive font is, quite simply, a font which looks like handwriting. And at this point, the only one I can name, and be just-about one hundred percent certain that you will be able to take a look at as an example is the dreaded Comic Sans MS. Well, I say "one hundred percent." If you're reading this on Windows there is, according to this list, a 99.6% chance that you've just read the name of The Font Which Should Ne'er Be Seen in the relevant type-face. On a Mac, it's a 95.7% chance, and on Linux, 68.4%. (That's before the installation of any office software or other such programs which almost certainly install it, along with many other fonts additional to those shipped with the OS.) Which brings us neatly to what I mean by "web-safe."

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Freethought Blogs And Horizontal-Scroll

After being constantly annoyed by the way freethought blogs' new layout puts half the content and comments off the right-hand edge of my browser, forcing me to constantly use the much-hated horizontal scroll-bar, I found an easy way to correct it in Firefox. And being a nice sorta chap, I thought I'd share it.

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HTML And Alt+ Codes For Macrons

This one's for Rustiguzzi, who asked about macrons in a comment.

Symbol	Name	html Code	Alt+
Ā	Macron A	Ā	256
ā	Macron a	ā	257
Ē	Macron E	Ē	274
ē	Macron e	ē	275
Ī	Macron I	Ī	298
ī	Macron i	ī	299
Ō	Macron O	Ō	332
ō	Macron o	ō	333
Ū	Macron U	Ū	362
ū	Macron u	ū	363

There ya go, mate!

I've also added them to my HTML symbols list.
—Daz

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