[Pmwiki-users] Re: AsSpaced function (was pmwiki-2.0.devel9 released)

John Rankin john.rankin
Sun Oct 3 16:04:16 CDT 2004


On Saturday, 2 October 2004 11:20 PM, chr at home.se wrote:
>On 2 Oct 2004, John Rankin wrote:
>
>> I find abbreviations with a lower case letter are a common problem,
>> like CoP or SOEs or BSc:
>
>Slightly related.. what's the plural of an acronym? For instance, let's 
>say we write CCD for 'charge coupled device' as in:
>
>	The CCD in my camera has 3.3 million photo sensitive elements.
>
>When using the acronym in a plural sence, I think I should be writing 
>something like:
>
>	The CCDs have become much cheaper lately.
>
>but because this is interpreted by PmWiki as a wiki word, I find myself 
>writing something like this instead:
>
>	The CCD:s have become much cheaper lately.

<pedantAlert>

Short answer: the tidiest convention is that the plural of CCD is CCD.

Discussion follows...

This is a deep typographical poser. The question also arises in well-
designed paper documents that use true small caps for acronyms and 
other abbreviations. True samll caps are the same weight and x-height 
as regular text. This is in contrast to computer-generated small caps
which are usually lighter and than normal text and have a slightly
taller x-height.

Why would you use true-drawn small caps? Some people say that 
capital letters in running prose are like lumps in otherwise
smooth mashed potatoes. They interrupt the smooth flow of reading.
Computer-generated ones are never as good as true-drawn, especially
at larger font sizes. If the acronym has a capital first letter, like
Anzac, the A stands out as heavier: not a good look.

But this brings a problem with plurals -- now the ess is the same 
size as the small cap before it and has nothing to distinguish it as
lower case.

The best answer is to omit the ess. (I have seen this in many, 
but not all, Adobe (may a plague of locusts descend upon their 
spring gardens) documents.) 

But many people think this is a wierd thing to do. Sigh.

Another approach is to use small caps that are a point size
larger than the surrounding text, so the ess looks slightly
smaller.

And using true-drawn small caps for text that's going to both 
print and web is a pain. Historically type vendors have done it
with special fonts, rather than with Unicode fonts. Unless you 
are very careful, the web page brings all the acronyms out in 
lower case.

So the long answer to your question is that a PmWiki abbreviation
and acronym markup (which lets a writer specify that CCD is an
abbreviation and Erma is an acronym) would have the writer enter
the abbreviation text as lower case and a style sheet renders it 
as small caps.

    {ccd|charge-coupled devices}

For the web, this would use font-variant: small-caps;

"God is in the details."

</pedantAlert>

Bet you are sorry you asked...
-- 
JR
--
John Rankin





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