OK, my first post in, like, forever is a self-indulgent blurb from my iPhone. It seems pretty easy so far, so if this works you may be hearing more from me.

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.