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  • Technical Newspaper Question

    From Lawrence D'Oliveiro@21:1/5 to All on Wed Jan 31 01:13:37 2024
    I wonder if anybody who has worked on newspapers can answer this.

    As an example, I came across a Herald article recently titled “Dunedin prepares for 10pc population increase over next 30 years”.

    The question is: why do newspapers use “pc” as their abbreviation for “percent” instead of the more usual “%” character?

    The latter character has been standard on computer keyboards for
    decades ... essentially since newspapers first discovered computers. Does
    it have some special meaning in their markup system, or something? Don’t
    they have fonts that can print it? (Aren’t they using the same computer- based fonts as everybody else, by now?)

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  • From Willy Nilly@21:1/5 to Lawrence D'Oliveiro on Wed Jan 31 03:51:15 2024
    On Wed, 31 Jan 2024, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <[email protected]d> wrote:
    The question is: why do newspapers use “pc” as their abbreviation for >“percent” instead of the more usual “%” character?

    This probably is a tradition from the ink-on-paper days when newsprint
    did not print fine characters well, and "%" is a fine character. If
    it doesn't print well, it could be illegible to the readers.

    Similarly, the word "FLICK" (in caps) was avoided...

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