Sunday 5 August 2012

Farewell My Lovely... Pilcrow

What is a pilcrow? It's a paragraph marker. It tells you where a paragraph ends. Or begins. Depending on your point of view. It looks like this. They are a nice way of breaking up blocks of text without making the text look ragged.

The idea is that they allow the reader's eye to find where the paragraph breaks are, while preserving the integrity of the block of text.

They're useful f
or liner notes on LPs, CD booklets, that sort of thing. Short sections of text which are part of a graphic layout.

They allow the
text to be treated as a single design element.

You wouldn't want to read an entire book where pilcrows are used — though early books were indeed printed that way. To me they seemed perfect for the small blocks of text used in a blog.

However, I've been advised to stop using them (by a trusted friend) because they make the blog less readable.

Well, since I did a big publicity push for my new novel (see my blog entry for Operation Herod), the last thing I wanted was a less-readable blog.


So now it's farewell little pilcrow. I'll miss you. Sob. Choke.

(I'm going to go on using you on my music blog, though! He said defiantly.) And here's a last blast of them:

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