Here’s a fun little pastime for a lazy weekend: Come up with a pangram — a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet — that incorporates the word InDesign.
Faithful listeners of our podcast know that InDesign and InCopy already have a pangram in Preferences > Story Editor Display : “Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow” is the one in localized English versions. We even sell t-shirts with that saying, though tragically, no one’s ever bought one, other than me.
The best pangram will a) Make sense, that is, use words found in the dictionary and be grammatically correct; and b) Contain the fewest duplicate letters. So, in English, a 26-letter pangram would be ideal. But, since we’re incorporating the word InDesign, the goal would be a 28-letter sentence, since the InDesign proviso means we’re already hobbled with two n’s and two i’s.
My best attempt after a grueling seven minutes or so, coming in at 39 letters, was this:
Ask InDesign jumble champ: QWERTY or a vixen fez?
It’s ten more letters than the black quartz one. And yes, I agree the use of QWERTY comes a little too close to cheating, but since most English speakers (at least those who use keyboards) know what it means, I’ll bend the rules. ;-)
Do you want to try it? Be sure to use this handy Pangrammer Helper 2.0 I found on type designer Mark Simonson’s blog, it makes the task a lot more fun:
You can type right into the text edit field in Mark’s web page (requires the Flash 8.x or later plugin), or you can download the program for Mac or PC. Looking forward to what you come up with!
This article was last modified on December 20, 2021
This article was first published on July 16, 2010
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