Confession: The three main articles in this issue of DesignGeek are all reprints of stuff I've recently published elsewhere. I'm giving them another airing because a) I think they're good and useful, and fit the mission of DesignGeek; b) You probably haven't read them yet, so what do you care; and c) I've got a project deadline today and can't spend my usual 8+ hours writing this baby up.

If you're a member of the QuarkXPress, InDesign, or GoLive listservs (e-mail based discussion groups), you may recognize the content, because that's where these "articles" first appeared … they are recent posts of mine, replies to questions posted by other listserv members, lightly edited for clarity.more >

[A longer post in response to a message from a GoLive listserv member in December.]

Subscriber Post (partial quote, it was a long message):

"I'm about to start a new site and would LIKE to optimize it for search engines, particularly Google (since most folks these days seem to think it's the most important). […] I was hoping for something along the lines of a few relatively unbiased recommendations from people with recent experience."

My Reply:

First, forget keywords. The old "keyword meta tags" thing doesn't work well anymore. Because of nefarious people taking advantage of search engine's attention to keyword meta tags, only a couple search engines actually pay attention to those these days. more >

[Here's a short one to give you a taste of typical listserv messages. This is a combination of two posts I sent to the QuarkXPresslistserv in January, in reply to two different posts that each had questions about new font formats.]

Subscriber Posts:

"What is a .dfont? What exactly are the *Pro* fonts?"

My Reply:

[Though it's an InDesign tip, this is from a post I sent to the QuarkXPress listserv. The original thread was about some of the members' experiences in moving to InDesign from Quark, and the message I replied to is partially quoted below. David Blatner's message follows my reply.]

Subscriber Post:

In my last issue of DesignGeek (lucky #13, 1/14/04), I listed the Windows keystrokes for the most frequently-used special characters (bullets, em dashes, etc.) in QuarkXPress and InDesign.

While researching that article I couldn't find a keystroke for making an en dash in QuarXPress for Windows, and so wrote "none that I know of" next to the entry.