In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance—published all around the world—a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing. The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond. With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye. A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing’s future.

Learn how to automate tasks in Adobe InDesign using JavaScript (and ExtendScript) with this guide that covers the fundamentals and beyond. Explore the InDesign Object Model and how to build page objects, style text, manipulate tables and frames. This is the essential guide for anyone who wants to get started with scripting InDesign.

In this detailed overview of the history of the handmade book, Avrin looks at the development of scripts and styles of illumination, the making of manuscripts, and the technological processes involved in paper-making and book-binding. Readers will have a greater understanding of ancient books and texts with More than 300 plates and illustrations Examples of the different forms of writing from ancient times to the printing press Coverage of cultural and religious books Full bibliography Reference librarians and educators will find this resource indispensable.

An introduction to the history and techniques of writing that offers a thorough and accessible historical overview of techniques and processes, illustrated with examples, diagrams, and photographs of crafts people at work.

Updated: June 2015. Author Peter Kahrel updated this Short Cut to cover InDesign CC. Several examples have been added, and most examples are now analysed in more detail. Updated: August 2010. Author Peter Kahrel updated this Short Cut to cover InDesign CS5. Updated: November 2009. Author Peter Kahrel updated this Short Cut to address typos and reader comments. GREP (short for "General Regular-Expression Print") is a powerful tool that lets you use wildcards ("jokers") to search and replace text. InDesign's GREP implementation can be used for text and also for formatting codes, finding patterns in text as well as literal text. GREP moves beyond the restrictions that hampered earlier InDesign search features, but unfortunately it does have the reputation of being difficult to master. As with many things, it can be challenging to learn, but, fortunately, a lot can be done with surprisingly simple expressions. The aim of this Short Cut is to show how to create simple but powerful regular expressions.

The Turn & Burn methodology offers practical, real-world advice for quickly turning stories - within any genre - into engaging and authentic movie scripts.

The key to mastering any Unix system, especially Linux and Mac OS X, is a thorough knowledge of shell scripting. Scripting is a way to harness and customize the power of any Unix system, and it's an essential skill for any Unix users, including system administrators and professional OS X developers. But beneath this simple promise lies a treacherous ocean of variations in Unix commands and standards. bash Cookbook teaches shell scripting the way Unix masters practice the craft. It presents a variety of recipes and tricks for all levels of shell programmers so that anyone can become a proficient user of the most common Unix shell -- the bash shell -- and cygwin or other popular Unix emulation packages. Packed full of useful scripts, along with examples that explain how to create better scripts, this new cookbook gives professionals and power users everything they need to automate routine tasks and enable them to truly manage their systems -- rather than have their systems manage them.