Issue Number 26 - June 2000

There's a new and enlarged edition of this classic reference for writers and editors. It's a dictionary with all the obvious stuff left out. What remains is advice on items such as difficult spellings, obscure words, foreign terms, abbreviations, rules for capitalisation - and when to use '-ise' and '-ize'. It's twice the size of the original, and the explanations are more developed. OUP have also added more details of people and places. Full review at -

http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/oxf-wri.htm

Incidentally, I will send my copy of the first edition FREE OF CHARGE to anybody who is prepared to write a 500 word review of their own favourite dictionary.

'Marking Essays' - Help is at Hand!
After the exams, are you now faced with mountains of essay scripts to mark? Would you like to make the job easier? 'Marking Essays' offers hints, tips, and solutions. It deals with the common problems of grading, and how to offer suggestions for improvement.

http://www.mantex.co.uk/books/marking.htm

MP3 The Definitive Guide
MP3 is the audio file format which is now the most sought-after item on the Internet. Many people have huge collections of music on their hard disks - acquired legally, illegally, and by swapping (which *might* also be illegal). The most popular site at http://www.napster.com is currently in hot water for promoting these 'free exchanges'. If you want to know how to download the music, compile your own library, and get the free software to deal with it all - then Scot Hacker's book in the excellent O'Reilly series of 'Definitive Guides' is a good place to start. Just think, you could be only one click away from your own collection of the Spice Girls - Ooops! I mean Beethoven.

http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/hacker-2.htm

Internet: The Rough Guide
Rough Guides are a series of cheap-and-cheerful pocket books for travellers. They explain the basics and point you towards free and good-value sources of information. Their guide to the Internet was created for beginners and has now completely outgrown its origins to become an international bestseller. It offers what it claims - a guide to getting onto the Net, selecting a service provider, using email, searching web sites, and even starting in e-commerce. Perfect for beginners - and it's amazingly good value. Review and details at -

http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/kennedy.htm

The Naked Civil Servant Speaks
[Quentin Crisp was the flamboyant UK dandy and gay crusader who died recently in New York. He once earned his living as a nude art school model.]

"If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist."

Quentin Crisp

New Shorter Oxford Dictionary on CD-ROM
The 'Shorter Oxford' is the huge [but cut-down] version of the Complete Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press have completely revamped their latest version and added new materials. It now puts emphasis on contemporary relevance, and they have provided lots of modern sources as illustrative examples. It still covers half a million definitions, so it's not that short; and the CD version provides multiple searching facilities - on etymologies, rhymes, and even anagrams. [Very good for crossword puzzle addicts.] It's also much cheaper than the printed version. Full details and review at --

http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/oxf-cdr.htm

Books and their Enemies
In 1866, Algernon Charles Swinburne's 'Poems and Ballads' was withdrawn after threats of criminal prosecution. Such phrases as 'splendid supple thighs' and 'quivering flanks' were too much for the public. But Swinburne found another - braver - publisher and refused to alter his poems for the prudes.

[Source: Bookends]

Fonts - A Reminder Tip
To remind yourself of the look of your favorite fonts, create a special document that displays them. On each line of the document, type the name of a font you use regularly, and format it with that font. Then save this where you can find it easily and consider printing it to keep close at hand while you work. If you can't be bothered, Jo Barta has already done one for you as part of his excellent FREE web design tutorial. For details, see Mantex newsletter No 2

http://www.mantex.co.uk/news/news-02.htm

Visual Language FREE Newsletter
Bob Horn (The Visual Language Project, Stanford University) is offering a free newsletter to support his research on 'visual language'. He writes: "Several articles about my book 'Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century' have focused a good deal of attention on our visual language project at Stanford University. In order to cope with the volume of questions we've been asked, we are producing a free newsletter periodically, entitled 'VISUAL LANGUAGE UPDATE'.

It will summarize projects we're working on, both research and applications. We will review important books and articles in the field, present brief critiques of issues, explore the relationship of visual language to information design, and document web links to significant sites about visual language." If you want to be on the mailing list, please send a message to

info@macrovu.com

[source InfoDesign newsletter]

Design Tutor Magazine
The latest issue of this elegant guide to DTP covers articles on fonts, using grids, asymmetrical page layout, and using type for design. Unlike many other design journals, it assumes you are limited to simple tools such as a word-processing package and maybe a program such as PageMaker. It's very well produced, and has a fine eye for detail. Details at --

http://www.designtutor.com