Shady Characters

Might I also recommend Keith Houston's wonderful book "Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punc­tu­ation, Sym­bols, & Other Ty­po­graph­ical Marks": https://shadycharacters.co.uk/books/shady-characters-the-book/ He also posts, with some regularity, to his blog on the same topic: https://shadycharacters.co.uk/ Employing the correct usage of hyphens, en dashes and em dashes continues to be a small daily joy for me.

If you need something free/opensource, there’s not many options. When you like it old-school, you can give Knuth’s companion to TeX MetaFont¹ a try. Then there’s FontForge², which is by far the most evolved, feature-heavy project, but until recently had bad UX/UI and was a pain to install and run on OSX. It seems, that’s changed, though. FontLab³ still is the type design “industry”’s de facto standard font editor, but development lags behind, and it’s quite expensive for a hobby project. There are a few other proprietary offerings, notably the DTL FontMaster⁴ tool suite. But Glyphs⁵ seems to be going the winner, steadily taking over market share from FontLab. If you like scripting your designs (esp. in Python) you should definitely try RoboFont⁶. When you’re looking for volunteers/collaborators on your project, then do check in at Typophile⁷. For over a decade, it’s the principal outlet for all things type and type design: on the fora you’ll meet some very knowledgable experts always willing to help. Since you mentioned punctuation, I suppose you’re familiar already with the _Shady Characters_⁸ project (and its companion book⁹). As for a detailed history, I can highly recommend Malcolm B. Parkes† authoritative monograph on the subject,…

This series on it https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/04/the-interrobang-part-1/ was always one of my favorites on the topic.

This article takes its content from the book "Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks" by Keith Houston. The book originated on his website as a series of articles, the "&" ones are: - The Ampersand, part 1 of 2 (https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-1-of-2/) - The Ampersand, part 2 of 2 (https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-2-of-2/) - The Ampersand, part 2½ of 2 (https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/the-ampersand-part-2%c2%bd-of-2/… I'd highly recommend the website and the book, and also his new book "The Book" about the origin of the book.

The 8-part series this comes from (starting here [1]) was a really good read. Very informative, regardless of one's stance on emoji. [1] https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-beginning/

This appears to be a lightly summarised excerpt of Houston's (fascinating) book "Shady Characters". As mentioned briefly at the end of the article, he has an interesting blog where he discusses more: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk .

The blog "Shady Characters" has a lot of great investigation about the history of the Octothorpe[1], and similarly the Pilcrow[2], Ampersand[3], and "commercial at"[4]. [1]: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/05/the-octothorpe-part-1-of-2/ [2]: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/02/the-pilcrow-part-1/ [3]: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-1-of-2/ [4]: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/the-symbol-part-1-of-2/

i love the fact that the first century BCE Tironian et still shows up in irish gaelic signs today. [1] the shady characters blog has a great write up on Cicero and his scribe Tiro [2] [1] http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-2-of-2/ [2] http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-1-of-2/

This reminds me of Keith Houston's wonderful blog, Shady Characters (http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/). Keith has written at length on the pilcrow, interrobang, and sarcasm marks (all touched upon briefly in this article) amongst other punctuation marks. I am somewhat surprised that Shady Characters was not cited by the article. There is simply no better place to learn the surprising, entertaining histories of our punctuation.

However, for anyone who does happen to be interested in the history of emoji, Keith Houston's Shady Characters blog has a ten(!) part series [0] on them. [0] https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-beginning/

The bottom row of this has some more examples: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/roman-i… (found via Google Image Search for italic ampersand). The one in the second column from the left (again, bottom row) is how I write my ampersands by hand.

But it doesn't mean / 100, it means "per 100" as described here in "The history of the percent sign" http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2015/03/percent-sign/

You may also find its history interesting then: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/02/the-pilcrow-part-1/

That's nothing compared to Shady Character's article on it[1] (if anything, this feels more like a summary of it). [1] http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-1-of-2/

> It wasn't a letter of the alphabet any more than the dollar sign, the pound sign, or punctuation were letters of the alphabet. I'm not aware of historic English alphabets that include the dollar or pound sign or any sort of punctuation. On the other hand there is a lot of evidence of & being part of the alphabet. Wikipedia has or links to plenty of cases: * Old Saxon alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_Latin_alphabet#/media/File:J… * The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks: https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/moore/moore.html#moore5 * Byrhtferð's Old English Alphabet: https://www.evertype.com/standards/wynnyogh/thorn.html * My Own Primer, or First Les­sons in Spelling and Read­ing: https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/the-ampersand-part-2%C2%BD-of-2/ None of these are songs.