check this shit out

i was looking through the work requests just now and found this:

 

Please see the proof for order #4711412. There are two lower case letters appearing - the font we use on all Property items for Sotheby's uses large and small capital letters - never lowercase letters... Please check the template and advise. Thanks.

 

i thought to myself, there has to be some reason two random letters would become lower case. like, the combination of the two triggers some thing to happen with the font. like how in word if you have two dashes next to each other they turn into one long one (if you have that functionality turned on).

 

so here's what i found out:

 

'fi' ligature
      Elizabeth Baker At: Jun 12, 2006 19:05:39
The text that is being altered is 'Whitefish Cabin' and the 'fi' is the part that appears to be lower case. If you separate the f and i, they become small caps. I also tried 'find' and it made the 'fi' lower case as well. 

I'm guessing that 'fi' may be a special/reserved character in the font. There is a character that is a 'fi' ligature. Note: it does the same thing for 'fl' which is another special character. I am not sure if it is the template or the font that converts the two letters to a symbol.

Template 20419.
 

man, i'm awesome. there was something similar to that a few weeks ago that i figured out. a product was getting a path added in front of a web address, and i figured out it was because the web address was www.jpgould.com and our system saw the ".jpg" part and thought it was pointing to an image. so it came out as like E:\merrillshop\www.jpgould.com or something like that, whatever the local server address is.

 

i love problem solving computer crap. especially when i can figure it out. people frequently come to me at work and ask me to figure out why something's not working and i usually do. yay, my claim to fame! i can do something right, for once!!!

 

today two people were trying to figure out some issue and i wanted to scream because i knew how to fix it, but they were in another area and i'd feel weird if i just went over and said "i was eavesdropping, but just do this and it will fix it." that happens all the time.