Silmaril Consultants

Things people have said about text and textuality

This is a collection of quotations, some of which used to be on our front page. So many people asked for them we decided to collect them together and keep them. If you have any more to add, please mail them to us.

Anonymous client

Textual Therapy is the new paradigm: massaging your boss's ego has been replaced by massaging her information.

From the ClueTrain Manifesto site

The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery.

Peter Flynn

(post on comp.fonts)
…persuading users that spreading fonts across the page like peanut butter across hot toast is not the route to typographic excellence.

(post on the XSL mailing list)
…XSL: Think like a tree, not like a chainsaw.

Frederic Goudy

The man who would letter-space lowercase would steal sheep.

Client

XML isn't about pointy brackets and arcane rules, it's about improving your bottom line by making your information work harder.

Senior administrator of an Irish university in 1987

This computer networking thing will never take off…it's just a device to let operators chat to each other.

Anonymous Usenet poster

Lots of systems pretend that what you see is what you get, but unless you have a 1270dpi paper-white A4 screen, WYSIWYG is just a bare-faced lie. LaTeX's screen preview is great, but its real forte is that it just sets type superlatively well, again and again. For the technologically aware, the payback can be immense.

Beta Starchild

The paperless office will arrive at about the same time as the paperless toilet.