Pending Orphan Works Legislation
Subscribe to Origami Tutorials on iTunes U.
We like to take a break from our technical focus during long weekends. So, in honor of the extended Labor Day holiday, we encourage you to get away from your computer, and enjoy a little low-tech paper folding. Apple’s iTunes U serves up a fun collection of tutorial podcasts by physicist Robert Lang who is also one of the world’s foremost origami artists and theorists.
Link: Robert Lang on iTunes U
Subscribe to the podcast collection and learn how to fold a square piece of paper into a duck, a sparrow, and a swallow. A nice way to tip your toe in the pool of origami paper folding.
Special Character Shortcut Cheatsheets.
John Brandt’s Special Character Shortcuts (free) is a comprehensive PDF that shows how to access almost any special character in any font. The 16-page PDF includes cheatsheets for accented characters, ligatures, punctuation, currency, legal symbols, math, and greek symbols. Print out the pages for the characters you forget most often, and post them near your computer.
Link: Special Character Shortcuts PDF
Keystrokes are listed for Mac and Windows, as well as HTML codes for web pages. There is also a special section on special nonprinting characters in QuarkXPress 7 and 8, and a handy typographer’s glossary.
Proofreading With Your Eyes Closed.
Here is a technique I use every week while proofreading final drafts of this tips newsletter. When you need to proof your final documents or important email, have your computer read the text out loud to you and listen for mistakes. You’ll catch errors you might otherwise miss.
In many OS X applications, you can highlight your text and choose [Application] > Services > Speech > Start Speaking Text (if you are using Mail for example, look under the Mail menu next to your Apple menu).
As with last week’s tip, this trick only works in Cocoa apps. If you are using an Adobe or Microsoft program where this doesn’t work, just paste the text into a new TextEdit document and have your Mac read from there.
Shift-Click With Photoshop’s Eyedropper.
Press ESC for a Pop-up Autocomplete List.
Visualize Your Website Using a Word Cloud.
Wordle is a fun website that generates word clouds from any text you provide. Word clouds are a visual way of looking at the words used on a website. The image above is a visualization of the words on the front page of the Creativetechs website. The size and color of each word reflects how frequently it appears in the overall page.
Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds
If you design websites for a living Wordle is more than a toy. The words you use on your client’s sites form the online brand as far as Google is concerned. So you really have to pay attention to the words you use. Do they reflect the brand that you’re working to create?
