One of our tasks here at CS4FN is to proofread our magazines before we put them in the post and send them out to our subscribers. We’re not just checking for spelling (although obviously we check for that too) but we need to make sure that any links will be clickable for the online version of the magazine, that images don’t hide any text, that the text makes sense and that we’ve not used a long complicated word or phrase when a more quotidian* one would do. In short we want you to be able to read, understand and interact with the magazine whether you’re holding it in your hands or turning the pages with a finger-press or mouse-click. And hopefully enjoy it!
Last week we posted about That Time When I Did Not Proofread a change I made to the list of names and addresses to post the magazine to. Today’s post involves a couple of ridiculous examples where people haven’t paid much attention to what a computer is sending to a printer.
Mislabelled jeans
Our first example is this pair of probably counterfeit jeans spotted at a market in Thailand. The label is supposed to have a logo on it and it’s likely that the stallholder has an Excel spreadsheet or similar with information about the logos and which labels to print them on.
Unfortunately a bug has meant that instead of printing the actual logo the printer has instead printed the instructions and so the logo, in red at the bottom, is now just this line of code
=IIf(Label="","RMA","?")
Most people’s favourite example of this sort of thing is the cake baked to wish someone’s Aunt Elsa a happy birthday. It didn’t quite go to plan.
But before we meet the cake let’s have a brief detour into how text on a computer can be formatted. If I want to make a word italicised or have it stand out in bold I can do this very easily by selecting the word and pressing an i for italic or b for bold button. On a web page this puts a tiny invisible bit of code on either side of the word, it’s not difficult to see how it works.
One way to write this is to put an < em > code around a word I want to italicise (’em’ for emphasise). Note that I have to write it as < space em space > because if I write it without the spaces then your browser will assume that I want to italicise whatever comes next. I can write it correctly in the display box below though as the browser now knows that I just want to show the bit of code and not run it.
<em>italic</em>
The first < em > means “make everything after this italic” and the final < em > means “end the italic command”.
Ditto for bold.
<strong>bold</strong>
This is HTML or HyperText Markup Language and is one of the tools web designers use to make text on web pages work. HTML code can also be used to add non-standard characters like é or ç to the text too.
This cake takes the biscuit
There are printers that use edible-ink to print text or photographs onto icing to decorate a cake. The intended birthday-cake message was written using Microsoft Word and had a variety of headings, bold words, non-standard characters and so on. Word ‘coded’ these using its own proprietary add-ons for HTML (these are normally invisible and you’d never notice) but unfortunately the printer struggled to make sense of the instructions, as you can see in this image of the cake. Presumably the cake tasted just as delicious either way.
It might seem quite surprising that the bakery didn’t check the message before printing or, once they’d seen the output, consider re-printing and covering up the odd message. However, as the (probably slightly stressed) owner said “We just cut and paste from the email to the program we use for printing the edible images, we are usually in such a hurry that we really don’t have time to check. And if we do the customers yell at us for bothering them.“
But sometimes it can be really, really important to check and double-check before pressing that OK button. Here’s a story about how a full stop (when used as a decimal point) could be the difference between getting the right dose of medicine versus a dangerous overdose.
Find out more and come to our birthday party!
If you’re in London on Tuesday 6th May you can come to Queen Mary University of London to hear its author (and CS4FN’s co-founder) Paul Curzon give a lecture on The illusion of Good Software Design at CS4FN’s 20th birthday celebration – free! The event is aimed at 11+ (and adults) and features some table magic too. Get yourself a ticket and come along.
There will be cake but we promise to proofread any printed icing first!
*quotidian means ordinary, everyday, mundane
Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).
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