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An ampersand & when displayed in a question title is, I believe, un-recognisable!

This don't look like no ampersand I ever did seen

Obviously they don't get used in question titles very often, or I'm sure I would have noticed this before.

What do others think? Is it just me being obtuse, or is that a very strange rendering of an ampersand?

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    Looks very nice to me.
    – boehj
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 13:07

3 Answers 3

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I speak for myself, but I don't have a problem recognizing the &-character.

MS Trebuchet is the only web-common font that uses an italic-style ampersand. It visually expresses the origin of the character (Latin "et" = E + t).

Source: The History of the Ampersand and Showcase

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    Wow. I had no idea. So that Et (which is what I thought it was in the first place) is actually a more correct ampersand! Who'da thunk it.
    – Mark Henderson Mod
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 10:30
  • love that blog link; reading through a bunch of their articles now, gonna have to make some tweaks to my site. Thank you!
    – Chris S
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 14:40
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Crappy though it be, I've seen that design many times before, in both print and electronic media, and have no problem recognising it as an ampersand. FWIW, when handwriting I do my ampersands the same way they are shown in the font used in this answer (&) and most people ask me what that symbol is. Oddly enough, people generally have less trouble recognising it when handwritten pretty much as in the example you are asking about. Go figure.

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I think it's a genuine bug, probably easy enough to fix going forward and if people don't raise this type of thing then it'll never get fixed, so well done :)

Might be tempted to add the feature-request tag though.

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  • I'm not quite sure how you'd fix it though. Render ampersands in their own span to change the font to something that still renders an & but still fits the font?
    – Mark Henderson Mod
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 9:37
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    I have literally no clue but there are some very smart dudes in the dev team.
    – Chopper3 Mod
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 9:54

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