I do a lot of work for Amex and therefore have to pepper copy with copyright and trademark symbols. It has always driven me nuts that when I superscript a symbol, it would cause a jump of a few pixels in that line of copy. My solution was either to grin and bear it-because I was usually the only one who noticed anyway-or to not superscript-which was usually caught by the proofreader.

Don’t ask me how, but I came up with a fix. Create a CSS style with zero leading, and apply it to the <sup> wrapped around the symbol. It’s that easy. One more minor frustration removed from the big list.

Update

This still doesn’t fix it everywhere. I now add this inline style to my <sup> tag: style=”font-size: 70%; line-height: -1px; vertical-align: text-top;”

It compensates for superscript for text at 11–13pt in most cases. Enough at least to satisfy my clients.

Update 2

I had some lines of tinier type with messed up line-spacing and a fussy client forced me to find another solution. This is now working well for me: “font-size: smaller; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; bottom: 0.33em;”

Be sure to put it in a sup tag!

I knew it would happen eventually: comment spam has forced me to turn off comments on my blog. For a while it wasn’t too bad, but over the past week it’s gotten much, much worse. I might turn comments back on if I have write a post that I’m dying for feedback on, or if I discover some new technology that filters out the spam before I need to, but I’ll probably mostly just keep them off.

The spammers really ruin everything. What morons actually make these jerks rich? Wonder if they’d buy anything from me. hmmmmm…

UPDATE: O.K., the comment-spammers were still able to get me even though I had comments off. I’ve installed HashCash to try to thwart further spamming, and I’ve turned comments back on. I did manage to reconnect with some old friends through comments, so I’d might as well turn them back on if spammers will get me either way. Thank goodness I haven’t had to deal with comment-flames yet.

First of all, we had our wedding down in Mexico. There were several setbacks, with flights getting cancelled left and right, but in the end everyone who was trying to get there made it. Steve and Delmy at Playa Maya helped us put on a hell of a shindig, complete with mariachi and fire dancers.

Then, as soon as we returned, and after we recovered from the flu, we packed for our move to the Seattle area. I did not expect boxing up our little apartment to be the task that it became. Of course, we finished the evening before the movers arrived. On December 29th, Mayflower showed up and had our life on their truck within an hour. By noon we were on the road in the Honda with enough provisions (hopefully) to help us get by until our lives reappeared in our new home.

We headed across the continent, out of New York and through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and finally Washington. By the evening of the 5th day, we were only a few hours away from Seattle, but with the Leasing Office of our new community closed we had no way to get into our new digs, so we settled in for morning and arrived early the next day. We were fortunate on our journey to have minimal car trouble (we had to get the dash and taillights fixed on the road) and to experience very little snow, none of it impeding our passage.

And now we sit in our big, empty townhouse. We contacted the mover on the 6th and learned that a breakdown in Oregon would prevent him from delivering our possessions until the 16th. We picked up some pots and pans at Macy’s as soon as we arrived, and bought a desk (which was smashed upon unboxing it. We got a replacement yesterday) and some chairs at IKEA. We brought our airbed from New York, and it has been serving us well. I have changed the plates on the car and picked up a Washington license (complete with new, long, surname), so I guess it’s official; we are Washingtonians now. Or is it Seattleites?