Re: [Groff] Hello to you all ! a digression...

[Stewart C. Russell]

Thomas Baruchel wrote:
> Does someone
> know what is for instance a fly-foot (in french: "pied-de-mouche" where 
> "mouche"
> which I have translated by "fly" is the little insect). It was used to mark a
> separation between two paragraphs

I think we call them pilcrow, and they look like this: ¶ (source:
http://members.aol.com/alembicprs/glocase.htm)

Alternatively, this may be the character (I think) we call the
'viniculum', that little leafy-thing that's in Zapf Dingbats. That's
what I think English* typesetters used. I shall check in the Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the English Language, which has a nifty bit on
historical typesetting.

French typography is interesting. Its spacing is very different from
British/American. Glad to see that someone somewhere has stuck to their
guns.

 Stewart


*: we Scots tended to use French typesetters. They were cheap and quick,
the DTP of the day. Sadly we lost a few of our more colourful letters to
misunderstandings. We had a character that looked a bit like a cursive Z
which was sounded 'ng'; French typesetters just used a Z, and now we
have wacky things like "Menzies" pronounced "Mingus"...

-- 
Stewart C. Russell              Senior Analyst, Dictionary Division
address@hidden  HarperCollins Publishers
use Disclaimer; my $opinion;    Glasgow, Scotland