HOME Monday, 23 April, 2001

A brief five minutes of warm, sunny weather, reminded me of the 'sixties and the laughably typographical mistakes of one of the Sunday newspapers of the time. It was either The Sunday Press or The Sunday Independent. I can't be certain now which of them it was, so I will refer to it as The Sunday Disaster.   It didn't contain the merely comical mistakes which one used to cut out and send to Titbits to earn a few bob, such as describing the Limerick Hurling full back, Pat Hartigan, as the 139-year-old veteran. Oh, no! The eccentric typography of The Sunday Disaster was an altogether finer, stranger thing than that.  Odd, alien words appeared in the middle of paragraphs, words such as lkbghitzpws and szeepioyg, unpronounceable by any human vocal chords, paragraphs ended in mid sentence, as though the compositor had been shot while composing, or else trailed off into gobbledegook, obviously sub-edited by someone from Mars.  Typographical errors at that time were amusing because they were so rare (except for The Sunday Disaster, which was in a class of its own). These days such errors are merely annoying because they are so widespread.  It can be confidently asserted that technological progress has retarded rather than improved the job of composition. Computers make the job so much easier and yet a less accurate product is the result! Perhaps the problem is that people expect too much from computers. It may be that they are under the impression that if their computer doesn't spot the error, then it must be that no error exists. This is a fatal mistake to make. Do they ever read the finished product themselves? A spell checker may pass a word as correct even when the word is used in the wrong context. This is one of the most common errors. While there are context checkers available, no program is infallible, and no computer is more intellegent than a human being. The lesson is: use computers to help, but don't rely totally on them.  I don't get to read too many magazines and newspapers these days, because of the price, but I find the mistakes in Ireland's Own a horrible example of slack sub-editing and lack of common sense. Words are often used in the wrong context, and graphics are squeezed into spaces without any reference to their aspect ratios. (Check out the head of Cassidy over the column Cassidy Says. Doesn't his head looked squashed?) Because you know how to use a graphics program doesn't mean you can stop thinking.  Even the once pristine Cork Examiner (Irish Examiner, how are you!) has now gone the way of all the rest. One of its particular foibles is repeating the contents of fillers throughout the paper. Doesn't anyone ever check anything anymore?  In my own modest DTP productions, I make the same mistakes, of course, but, then, I'm not getting paid for it. If I was, I would be a lot more careful!