It appears we will be able to have our cake and eat it too. I have already installed a special voice font inside the voice stack, and by next issue we should have a printing feature that can handle the new font.

As it stands now, the voice font is simple 12 point Geneva with a few special modifications. You can now hold down the option key to produce sticky quotation marks and parenthesis. We can add whatever new characters we need.

Here's what we have so far (each character is produced by holding down the option key and pressing another key):

option '	sticky single quote
option "	sticky double quote
option 9	sticky open parenthesis
option 0	sticky close parenthesis
option k	(command key symbol)

Note that 9 and 0 are located on the same keys as the parenthesis so all of these guys should be easy to remember.

I encourage all of you to use these characters in place of the normal keys. Until now, many of you have been inserting spaces and returns to force normal unsticky quotation marks and parenthesis onto the next line where they belong.

That was fine as long as the text remained in these narrow voice card fields. But now we have expandable fields, and soon we will have the capability to print full page width text to the printer or to a word processing file. Those extra spaces and returns look AWFUL when the text expands and there is no automatic way to remove them.

I realize that holding down the option key is a nuisance, but is seems the lesser of various evils. Incidentally, you should be aware that if you paste voice card text into a word processor, the sticky quotes will turn back into pumpkins, that is, they will appear as obscure symbols. Fortunately, you can change them back again by doing an automatic find and replace, or by installing the voice font in your system (more about this later).

NOW THEN, our next task is to invent some fun and/or useful new characters. One possibility is to come up with little smiling faces, frowning faces, etc. in place of the symbols recommended by Paul as voice card etiquette (See Vol 2 Paul 3). They can't be much bigger than a capital W. Perhaps someone one with drawing talent could send me some tiny faces in a Paint file. Maybe we could make tiny versions of our member icons!

There are sorts of possibilities here! Let me know if you have any ideas!