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Wasn't it originally intended for signage, advertising, titles, other display text, etc., rather than for body text?

The early books in particular are Austen with sailing, swearing, and sex.

As others have said, Times New Roman was specifically designed for newspapers:

* condensed glyph widths, for ease of setting in narrow columns

* high x-heights and short ascenders and descenders, so lines can be set tighter and more text thus fitted on the page

* robust forms and serifs to allow for the tendency of newsprint to absorb and spread ink

These features don't necessarily translate to improved readability in other contexts.

Originally, a font (also spelled fount, at least formerly) was a physical thing: a collection of metal slugs, each bearing the reversed shape of a letter or other symbol (a glyph, in typographical parlance). You would arrange these slugs in a wooden frame, apply a layer of ink to them, and press them against a sheet of paper.

The typeface dictated the shapes of those glyphs. So you could own a font of Caslon's English Roman typeface, for example. If you wanted to print text in different sizes, you would need multiple fonts. If you wanted to print in italic as well as roman (upright), you would need another font for that, too.

As there was a finite number of slugs available, what text you could print on a single sheet was also constrained to an extent by your font(s). Modern Welsh, for example, has no letter "k": yet mediaeval Welsh used it liberally. The change came when the Bible was first printed in Welsh: the only fonts available were made for English, and didn't have enough k's. So the publisher made the decision to use c for k, and an orthographical rule was born.

Digital typography, of course, has none of those constraints: digital text can be made larger or smaller, or heavier or lighter, or slanted or not, by directly manipulating the glyph shapes; and you're not going to run out of a particular letter.

So that raises the question: what is a font in digital terms?

There appear to be two schools of thought:

1. A font is a typeface at a particular size and in a particular weight etc. So Times New Roman is a typeface, but 12pt bold italic Times New Roman is a font. This attempts to draw parallels with the physical constraints of a moveable-type font.

2. A font is, as it always was, the instantiation of a typeface. In digital terms, this means a font file: a .ttf or .otf or whatever. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but consider: you can get different qualities of font files for the same typeface. A professional, paid-for font will (or should, at least) offer better kerning and spacing rules, better glyph coverage, etc. And if you want your text italic or bold, or particularly small or particularly large (display text), your software can almost certainly just digitally transform the shapes in your free/cheap, all-purpose font, But you will get better results with a font that has been specifically designed to be small or italic or whatever: text used for small captions, for example, is more legible with a larger x-height and less variation in stroke width than that used for body text. Adobe offers 65 separate fonts for its Minion typeface, in different combinations of italic/roman, weight (regular/medium/semibold/bold), width (regular/condensed) and size (caption/body/subhead/display).

Personally, I prefer the second definition.

If all DoS documents are prepared with the same software or software suite (e.g. MS Office), isn't that a distinction without much of a difference? They've gone back to using TNR.ttf instead of Calibri.ttf (or whatever the files are actually called).

IIRC, the British Army employed bayonet charges in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s.

Similar things:

* Perl MIDI::Score -- https://metacpan.org/pod/MIDI::Score

* Csound standard numeric scores -- https://csound.com/docs/manual/ScoreTop.html

* CsBeats (alternative score language for Csound) -- https://csound.com/docs/manual/CsBeats.html

What's a highlander market, or a highlander hopeful? Google wasn't helpful.

But it was never intended for 4:3. They were always in frame, just digitally removed.

> In the UK you are required by law to have working brakes on a bicycle.

But are you required to have them on a unicycle?

> ccTLDs reflect the ISO country codes of each country, and are intended for use by those countries, while gTLDs are arbitrary and reflect the fact that DNS was designed in the US. The ".gov" gTLD, for example, is for use by the US government, while the UK is stuck with ".gov.uk".

Fun fact, the UK's ISO country code is not actually "uk", but "gb". IIRC, ".uk" was grandfathered in (from JANET?) as an exception: ".gb" officially existed for a while in parallel, but no one ever used it and I think it's now defunct.

More recently, the idea that the Picts conquered the Scots (which they'd done once before, in the eighth century) and adopted their language (something which they seem to have already started on) has gained ground.

I don't think having the Scoti in the northeast of what is now Scotland from 300 BC to 1 BC inclusive is right. I don't think the term appeared until ~300 AD, and it originally applied to people from Ireland: it only later came to be applied to the inhabitants of northern Britain when Irish became commonly spoken there (whether by immigration, conquest, or deliberate self-Gaelicisation under the influence of Irish missionaries).

> Let me introduce you to Colchester, the oldest recorded town in the UK.

And a candidate for the location of Camelot, thanks to its Roman name, Camulodunum.

The article says it's been updated. Possibly the submitted headline reflects the original version?

> For those who don't know it, this is the name the department has had for most of its history

Not really. It's the old name of the Department of the Army. Except for the first nine years of the DoW's existence, the Navy had its own, independent department, as did the USAF once it was established as a separate branch.

The Department of Defense didn't exist until after WW2, and was called the National Military Establishment for the first couple of years.

You see a similar pattern in the UK, which had the War Office for the Army, the Admiralty for the Royal Navy and the Air Ministry for the RAF: after WW2, the Ministry of Defence was created, initially liaising and co-ordinating between the service ministries, and then fully absorbing and replacing them.

tl;dr the Department of War is the old name of the Department of the Army, not of the Department of Defense.

So no more M*A*S*H theme-song on YouTube?

For me, it was getting a laptop with a high DPI screen, and the frustrations in getting X to play nicely with that.

There were annoyances when I realised I could no longer use certain workhorses (e.g. feh), but usually a bit of digging turned up a drop-in replacement (e.g. imv).

> 2. 'orange' has been turned from the last element of the list to a non-last element of the list

Then why not consider it four changes?

3. 'banana' has been turned from the last-but-one element of the list to the last-but-two element of the list

4. 'apple' has been turned from the last-but-two element of the list to the last-but-three element of the list

Contrarily, the problem I have with non-materialist/physicalist explanations is that they don't really seem to explain anything.

If we assume dualism, that there is some non-material stuff -- call it soul or spirit or mind or psyche or whatever -- that gives rise to consciousness, I think it's fair to ask how it does that.

And if the answer is "we don't know" or "it just does", I really can't see what we've gained over materialism.

I believe that to be precise they check for the Today programme, the Radio 4 current-affairs slot where Cabinet ministers go to get monstered.

> If the slide deck is meant to be something that can be shared around and make sense without you, it needs to have a lot of text on the slides.

Then isn't that just a document? Why use a slide deck?

Thank you for the cmd-shift-g tip. That will save me a lot of grief.

Re your second tip: how do you navigate up? I couldn’t see an obvious way to do that, either.

The difficulty in navigating to arbitrary locations in file open/save dialogs.

I wanted to attach a build log to a Teams post (maybe we shouldn't be using Teams on Mac, but it's a corporate decision that's out of my hands), and I could not for the life of me figure how to get the file-selection dialog to look at the relevant folder (which was somewhere under /private/). In the end, I had to use iTerm to copy the file to somewhere the dialog could find.

Thank you! I was just thinking "how do I get this to display in Waybar", and now I don't have to spend time working on it.

EDIT: this is particularly timely because the UK Met Office has recently announced the retirement of the API I was previously using: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/services/data/datapoint/datapoi...

The Fowler and Partridge works are both arranged alphabetically, and in each the relevant entry is headed “who and whom”.

In Gowers, it is chapter 9, “The Handling of Words”, section “Troubles with Pronouns”, subsection 15, “Who and whom”; in the edition I own (Pelican Books 1962, reprinted 1970), that can be found on page 206.

Not irrelevant at all. The case of the relative pronoun is determined by its role in the relative clause, not by the role of the relative clause in the sentence as a whole.

See:

- H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

- Eric Partridge, Usage and Abusage

- Ernest Gowers, The Complete Plain Words

who are unanimous on this point.

But on the other hand:

"The book belongs to the person who purchased it last week". Not "whom".

I think it is reasonable to say that the object of the to is not "who(m)ever", but the entire clause "who(m)ever purchased it last week"; and that clause should follow normal subject/verb agreement.

Similarly:

* "I don't know who purchased the book last week", not "I don't know whom purchased the book last week."

* "This is the person who you said purchased the book last week", not "This is the person whom you said purchased the book last week."

I've done some digging, and Fowler, Partridge and Gowers all support my stance, so I'm fairly confident in it now.

From 2.5. Using Who, Whom, That, and Which Correctly:

> This book belongs to whomever purchased it last week.

That should be "to whoever", surely? The pronoun is acting as the subject of the verb "purchased".

> Hang on, slashes and year-month-day?

I believe slashes are the most common separators in Japan (which uses that order), at least when explicit kanji for "year", "month" and "day" aren't used.