Gordon Woolf's Blog

The strange case of uP and dOWN

What is the most annoying key on your keyboard?

For me, and maybe for you, it is the CAPS LOCK key. It seems to get in the way whenever I intend to hit the Shift key. If I'm lucky I may be in Word or some other program which allows me to highlight the mess which results and hit the command to change case, but in others there is no option but to delete and type the phrase or sentence again.

In Word 2010 you go to the Home tab and then in the Font area click on the Aa button to select from a wide choice including lowercase, Sentence case, Capitalize Each Word or tOGGLE cASE.

The CapsLock is a remnant of the old typewriter keyboard that has continued to exist to this day and has survived the many changes in computer keyvoards over recent decades which has seen the number of keys and the positions of some of them go from 83 on the original IBM PC to 104 for the US, Australia and most other countries, though many European layouts have 105 and some in Brazil and Japan have 107 and 109 respectively.

But there is something you can do about that caps lock key, and even about the strangest key, the one labelled SysReg. SysReg is also named as PrtScn, which doesn't actually print the screen but does put a screen dump or image into memory ready to be pasted in an image editor program such as Paint ot even Photoshop.

So, how do you get rid of CapsLock? 

The answer lies in Windows Registry Editor. In Vista and Windows 7 you can search for the local machine code control keyboard layout and replace the scancode which activates when you press the CapsLock key. It then involves entering a sequence of around 20 hex codes.

But there are easier ways. For example, go to:
http://www.randyrants.com/2006/07/sharpkeys_211.html
and download SharpKeys

I went for the MSI version. When installed, press the Add button, select the "Special Caps Lock" with code 00 3A and change it to the default which is "Turn Key Off". You could also change it to another version of the Spceial Left Control key which may be more helpful in reaching many control key combinations.

Think carefully before selecting to write the change to the Registry (you do have a back up of that, don't you?). Then you need to reboot to see it take effect. Though the program says for Windows systems up to Vista, it does work with Win7 too.

You can also download another program, KeyTweak, from http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/
I've read equally good reports of that but have no practical knowledge.

There are other websites you may find helpful, such as How-to-geek at:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/disable-caps-lock-key-in-windows-vista/

That page includes a downloadable set of .reg files to do what I've just done or to a Shift key or to swap the Caps Lock with the Scroll Lock key that may be sitting up there on the right between SysRg and Break. Did you even know you had those? Break dates back to the teleprinter and telegraph. It was a way for operators at each end to know that outlaws or bushrangers had not cut the line. When did you last need to know that?

This article appeared first in the November issue of PC Update, the magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group. It may be reprinted at no cost under Creative Commons conditions with Attribution.

Nonsense outlasts sense

If you want to insert some dummy text in a Word document, start a new paragraph, type =lorem() and hit Enter.

This will add three paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum characters in your document but if you want more text, use the formula =lorem(m,n) where m is the number of paragraphs and n the number of lines that should be included in each of these paragraph. Be warned it is not very accurate.

In OpenOffice type dt and press the F3 function key. Less control, in that you cannot vary the lengths or specify para numbers, but you can repeat as needed.

There are dummy text plugins for either program which give more control and many layout programs
have an option to "fill with placeholder text".

But you may wonder about the name Lorem Ipsum.

Those are the first words of what, supposedly, is some text set in the earliest days of movable type. The story goes that it got shoved together after it fell on the floor and was thereafter used to fill space until the actual typesetting was ready.

It has remained virtually unchanged for hundreds of years, which is more than can be said for any language, so nonsense has outlasted sense.

Indented paragraphs and period spaces

A recent Tweet about the pilcrow, that backward-P mark to indicate the end of paragraphs, reminded me of a piece I wrote a while ago answering someone who wanted to know why people used indented paragraphs with no space between lines and two spaces after a period, suggesting it was all due to newspapers.

Indented paras with no space between, yes that’s newspaper style, but two spaces after a period? Only in very amateurish newspapers which do not realize that in most fonts the extra space is built in with the actual dot at the left hand end of the glyph.

Spacing between paragraphs is quite common in newspapers when text is set ragged right, either as a style or for special features. And paragraph spacing is a common ploy to make stories fit.

How the paragraph came to be

According to Jan Tschichold, in an essay titled "Why the beginnings of Paragraphs Must be Indented" ...The medieval paragraph symbol ¶ originally could also appear in the middle of running lines and was colored. It signified the beginning of a new group of sentences. During the late Middle Ages such groups of sentences were introduced with a new line, but the habit remained of beginning the new group with the symbol for paragraphs, usually written in red. Some of the early printers even cut it as a type sort and printed it in black. Previously, though, it was inserted by hand in red by the rubricator (whose job description stems from the color: rubrum = red). The space for the symbol had to be left blank by the typesetter. But rubrication often did not take place, and it was found that the em quad indention or indent, as we call this empty space today, was sufficient by itself to define a new group of sentences, even without the red symbol. See his books for advice on using paragraphs, and lots more.