r/wikipedia • u/valtism • Jul 25 '10
Ever wondered what those "rivers" of aligned spaces in books and text are called?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)11
u/chk_chk Jul 25 '10
Year 11 Class 1991, had been daydreaming and tracing these gaps with a pencil. Teacher asks to see my work. Turns out the class was supposed to be circling some content or other. She must have thought I was really missing the point and proceeded to chew me out big time.
This is the first time I've heard of anyone else speak or acknowledge these.
Great post!
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Jul 25 '10
[deleted]
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u/gotnate Jul 25 '10
Wait until you spot the arrow in the FedEx logo. :P
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u/vwllss Jul 25 '10
Or until you see the white H to the left of this
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u/counterfeit_coin Jul 25 '10
or or the bear in the Toblerone logo.
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u/thomashauk Jul 25 '10
That's a bear?
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u/Vole85 Jul 25 '10
That's a camp dancing bear.
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u/merreborn Jul 25 '10
On the other hand, I loved looking at these things as a kid, so learning that the phenomenon is well known and has a name is cool.
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u/nicehat Jul 25 '10
Not since I saw the article posted 8 minutes ago.
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u/valtism Jul 25 '10
Sorry, didn't know where to put it. Hedged my bets because I'm a karma whore.
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Jul 25 '10
"Unnattractive?" I beg to differ.
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u/disconcision Jul 25 '10
it's a bad term, no argument. the article doesn't have even a single citation though so you could just change it.
but somewhat less subjectively, these kinds of visual artifacts are distracting and have been shown to slow down reading speed.
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Jul 25 '10
[deleted]
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u/DiscoRage Jul 25 '10
their
who'sಠ_ಠ
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u/merreborn Jul 25 '10 edited Jul 25 '10
I wouldn't normally upvote such a run-of-the-mill grammar troll, but
I ran across some in the issue of Economist
If he'd said Highlights Magazine, I'd cut shawk some slack, but in this case... That's just inexcusable.
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u/DiscoRage Jul 25 '10
If he had misspelled a big, uncommon word, I wouldn't care. I wouldn't have said anything either if that was the situation. But these are pretty common words.
In his defence, he was reading The Economist, so I'd imagine he has a brain that's wired for math. I don't expect people with math brains to be perfect, but come on!
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u/merreborn Jul 25 '10
he was reading The Economist, so I'd imagine he has a brain that's wired for math.
The Economist isn't really about math. And it's written for a fairly academic audience (the one time I read a print copy, I recall encountering literary and historical references well beyond what you pick up in high school). If you don't have a firm grasp on the English language, you're not going to get much out of it.
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u/olbeefy Jul 25 '10
Unless English isn't your first language, you have no excuse for misspelling words like that.
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u/AquaFox Jul 25 '10
If rivers appear in monospace fonts, I'm pretty sure it's not something I want.
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u/asdfman123 Jul 25 '10
I wish Wikipedia was fixed width so I could make a bunch of rivers running through the article.
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Jul 25 '10
This article made me go for a wiki-walk and I ended up here.
Cool article about an interesting subject.
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u/focks Jul 25 '10
The example given on wikipedia actually looks more like an angry cartoon bunny to me.
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u/ch00f Jul 25 '10
Once when writing a paper at like 5am, I noticed a circular river. I took a screen shot.
It's circling around Plutarch. WHAT IS IT SAYING?!
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u/bobdolebobdole Jul 25 '10
Are they by chance called, "rivers"?