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“I just chose words carefully”

unsung.aresluna.org

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Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#111

Post by jolmg »

schoen wrote: post #54
Leonard_of_Q wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those who lived through the (text-mode) WordPerfect era may remember 'widow and orphan protection' as being one of the features which was advertised for this program, i.e it could be set to either move that orphaned first line of a new paragraph to the next page or move a few extra lines or a whole paragraph to the next page to keep the widow company.

I remember using WordPerfect in that era and never understanding what that feature was. It seemed implausible to me that it was actually protecting human widows and orphans, but I couldn't imagine what it had to do with text layout!

Kinda cool when you learn the answer to something you were wondering about decades ago.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#112

Post by _jackdk_ »

EGreg wrote: post #39
_jackdk_ wrote: post #16

I wonder if at any point during writing, the heroic author of that Super Metroid guide learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles", and decided to own the mistake rather than reword the entire guide. Also, the font used for the monospace examples in the post is a great kick to the nostalgia. Which one is it? It reminds me of https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...

I think you meant "spelt" rather than spent. A but ironic, all things considered.

I did, yes. A but ironic indeed.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#113

Post by rmunn »

lukeh wrote: post #5

Ha, I quite enjoy doing this in comments or commit messages where practicable. But, that's just a few lines. :)

I must admit to occasionally rearranging words or choosing different synonyms to make a column of spaces line up in a monospaced paragraph, so that you could draw a straight line down one column the screen without passing through any letters or punctuation. Or making a diagonal line of spaces, top-left to bottom-right.

I usually only did that when the text already was close to lining up that way, though.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#114

Post by CarVac »

AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #109

In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.

Row/col works but width/height doesn't, alas.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#115

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

rectang wrote: post #101
cpeterso wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series. “And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me w…

Forming every paragraph of dialog into perfect rectangles is way more extreme than just avoiding "widows". The usual term for this is "full justification" and typographically when it's done it's typically through word spacing and letter spacing. Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog. I've sometimes he…

> I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.

This is an acceptable use of the term "widow". From the Oxford English Dictionary [0]:

> A short line of text (usually one consisting of one word or part of a word) which falls undesirably at the end of a paragraph, esp. one set at the top of a page or column.

But there are dozens of contradictory meanings for "widow" and "orphan" [1], so the definition that you gave isn't wrong either.

[0]: https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1579263894

[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-1/tb133chernoff-widows.pdf#subs... (Disclaimer: I'm the author of this article)

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#116

Post by alsetmusic »

That's the sort of attention to detail that makes me love an app. Apple used to have this. It's why I became one of their users. My hope is that John Ternus understands why this sort of "spinning of wheels" is essential when he takes over. I read that Steve Jobs picked the order of the icons in the Dock himself. Some people know that little things matter.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#117

Post by tobr »

diurnalist wrote: post #26
sho_hn wrote: post #2

There's a similar anecdote Gillian Anderson recently revealed during an interview on the X-Files , saying Chris Carter had an OCD-like habit to write dialog to conform to certain text layout preferences (no widows[1]) in the script, which made for the show's distinctive style of dialog cadence. 1 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans

I also saw that interview, then out of curiosity I tried to find any evidence of this. There are some fan sites with ostensibly original X-Files scripts out there[1]. Looking through some written by Carter[2], I wonder if this is apocryphal, or if he was messing with her a bit. [1]: https://www.boggsfiles.com/x-files-scripts-by-season/season-... [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQbfRmeq3FsajjYcEuqDHv0kf2B...

Hey, I looked into this too! And I came to the conclusion that it's completely true.

The movie she mentioned in the anecdote was I Want To Believe. Here is the actual scanned screenplay, rather than re-typed:

https://lvei.net/wp-content/uploads/script-de-prod/The-X-Fil...

Just scroll through and look. In almost every paragraph or dialogue block, the last line ends very close to the right margin. Pretty much the only places that doesn't happen is when there's a single short line of dialogue by itself, meaning it doesn't wrap to a second line.

Looking through scripts on Boggsfiles, it's much more inconsistent, but it does happen, and perhaps more frequently in the later seasons. Here's one, from season 9; take a look at page 10 (page 13 in the PDF) for example, but it really happens throughout.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dlnc2prPVgPLN4CQSiMQMvD2VSl...

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#118

Post by xamuel »

I did something similar in my paper "Meno II: A self-referential Socratic dialogue about memory and computer programming" [1] (published in The Reasoner). Every length-200 block of text is carefully chosen so as to steganographically encode one character of a computer program, and Socrates and Meno decode the program in real time by examining the words they've said.

I didn't do it entirely by hand, but I didn't just one-shot it with AI either (good luck). Instead, I wrote the whole dialogue in a special format specifying alternate words [like|similar to] [this|what I'm [currently doing here|doing right now]]. For each length-200 block, the number of variations grows exponentially in the number of "options" to thus choose from, so it becomes feasible to have a computer systematically choose options so as to hide the desired secrets.

The same method could be used for monospace alignment, though I suspect it would be harder the narrower the page be.

[1] http://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMIA-4.pdf

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#119

Post by zxcvgm »

CarVac wrote: post #114
AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #109

In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.

Row/col works but width/height doesn't, alas.

I sometimes use abbreviations like wd/ht. Should be understood with surrounding context.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#120

Post by janci »

fhub wrote: post #10

Two definitions that I had to look up. * Widow: a short final line of a paragraph that gets stranded at the top of the next page or column. * Orphan: a first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of a page or column.

There are also Rivers - when spaces between words on multiple lines align vertically. Harder to control for than widows and orphans.
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