fiction - Ways to reduce the -ing verbs in dialogue and action tags?

I find myself writing these a lot:

"Thanks." She tilted her head shyly to the side. As soon as she did, her chin-length hair slid off her face, revealing the bowl-sized bruise that made her tiny eye look enormous.

"Does it hurt?" I indicated her eyepatch tatoo with one hand, passing her the pen drive with the other.

How to avoid them?

Answer

I'm not entirely sure for your question whether you are trying to avoid the verb or avoid the entire clause. If you insert the action clause in the sentence, the ing verb is the right way to do it and anything else is going to sound forced and ugly.

However, regardless of the ing verb issue, mixing dialog and action like this tends to confuse the reader. Writing is all about focus. It is about directing the reader's attention to one thing in particular. If you mix dialog and action like this, the reader's attention is split between the two.

Dialogue is one of the most intimate and revealing of human interactions and it deserves our full attention. You will notice that when dialogue appears in most stories, it usually appears as a long sequence of speeches with little more than speech tags to identify the speaker and an occasional adverb to indicate tone. This lets the dialogue be the dialogue, and lets the reader focus on the dialogue.

It can be tempting to want to mix action into dialogue because that is how real human speech often works. The conversation is not carried by the words alone, but by actions such a pointing, and by facial expressions. However this kind of thing is difficult to reproduce on paper, where these motions have to be described in words, which take far longer to get the idea across than the motions themselves. For this reason, and because real speech is usually fragmentary and repetitive, fictional dialogue is not speech. In dialogue, the words are for more orderly and structured than in speech and they carry far more of the meaning.

You may use bits of vocabulary or diction to hint at the sound of real speech, but these are just decorations. Dialogue remains quite different from actual speech, and mixing too much action into dialogue just tends to slow it down. Actions in speech are simultaneous to words, but have to be described in series in dialogue, which gives the impression of them happening one after the other rather than simultaneously. Notice in your own sample how there feels like a long pause between each character's speech while the action takes place.

There is also the case where dialogue is incidental to action. In these cases you don't want the reader to focus on the dialogue but on the action. In these cases it makes sense to run the dialogue into the action, and even to avoid breaking it into a separate paragraph. In these cases, the use of the ing verb to tie the words to the action is appropriate, but you may want to do it the other way round, putting the essential action first and tacking on the incidental speech tag with an ing verb:

The lieutenant ran down the dock in a hail of bullets shouting "Cast off! Cast off!"

This seems to put the emphasis in the right place compared to:

"Cast off! Cast off!" shouted the lieutenant, running down the dock in a hail of bullets.

So, decide if it is the action of the dialogue that you want the reader to focus on in this scene. If it is the dialogue, move the action away from it. If it is the action, put the action first and make the dialogue incidental to the action.

InDesign - exporting PDF and viewing it in proof colours?

I exported a PDF from InDesign CS5 - it worked well, no issues with the program or the output of the PDF. My problem relates to color - this area's fairly new to me.

My OS is Mac OS X 10.6.7 Snow Leopard, if that's of any use.

When exporting, I selected ISOnewspaperv264 and it worked - but, here's the kicker - it didn't display as it in Acrobat Pro, except when I previewed it.

I had to use Output Preview to see it as ISOnewspaperv264, then convert colors to output intent ISOnewspaperv264 to get it to look like a printed publication and not in Acrobat Pro's default setting of Monitor Color (I don't really want to mess up the Acrobat settings, since it's a shared computer, not just me who uses the program!)

How would I in InDesign/Acrobat get it to view similar to the printed version upon export? I know in InDesign I can use view Overprint Preview, Proof Colors but I'm new to this area of digital/desktop publishing so any help would be required.

gui design - Radios on mobile apps - yes or no?

Is it a good idea to use radios on mobile apps? If not, how would you improve the below design?

Answer

In this case I think it's ok to use radio buttons but be sure they are easy to tap.

If you have only 2 or 3 available choices the solution below could be nice. I also removed the "check" button since it adds a step that can be avoided to make the process simpler (you can show the user that you're checking while he's typing and show that the given name is valid/invalid).

You can add a message :

And to show that you're already checking (even if you're waiting they finished to type) you could use an animated icon (a loader in fact) :

correlation - Cleansing covariance matrices via Random matrix theory

I am exploring de-noising and cleansing of covariance matrices via Random Matrix Theory. RMT is a competitor to shrinkage methods of covariance estimation. There are various methods expressed usually by the names of the authors: LPCB, PG+, and so on.

For each method, one can start by filtering the covariance matrix directly, or filter the correlation matrix and then covert the cleansed correlation matrix into a covariance matrix. My question involves the latter case.

I have noticed that when cleaning a correlation matrix that the resulting diagonal is not a diagonal of 1s (as one would expect to see in a correlation matrix).

My question -- when constructing a cleansed covariance matrix by first filtering its corresponding correlation matrix, does one:

1. 
   

   "Fix" the diagonals of the intermediate cleansed correlation matrix to a diagonal of 1s before finally converting it back to a covariance matrix? This seems to be the case with the PG+ method, but not the LPCB method.

   
   
   


2. 
   

   Or does one convert the cleansed correlation matrix to a covariance matrix and then fix the diagonal of the resulting covariance matrix to the diagonal of the original covariance matrix?

   
   

In both cases the trace is preserved.

Answer

I tested both procedures. The results are virtually indistinguishable - the decision is not consequential. I opted for approach #1.

Editing the size of rectangular grid tool in Adobe Illustrator CS6

I've been painting a pixel character in a of 32x32, but after the work is almost done I noticed I needed a little more dots, Is there any way to edit the grid to something like 64x64?

If not, is there any way to copy the painted dots inside a bigger grid and paste in another rectangular grid?

Thank you.

adobe illustrator - Working on Small Resolution Images in Photoshop ( icons )

Possible Duplicate:
How to resize icon sets in Photoshop?

I want to get a solution for a question that has been in my mind for a long time.

For the past 2 years, several times I was assigned to do some job involving low resolution images. Such as icon making, favicon making etc. These files have very low resolution like 16*16 px, 32*32px or maybe upto 100px.

I used Photoshop and Illustrator for creating such graphics. It looks fine and perfect in high resolution, but when I try to decrease the size to required low resoution, the images have noticeable defects in clarity. I was surprised to see low resolution images in other websites with better clarity and wondering, How is that possible? Hope stack will solve my problem.

checkboxes - Is a circular checkbox bad UI design?

A radio button is normally presented as circular control but more recently checkboxes are also being presented with a rounded border making them look like radio buttons.

http://flatlogic.github.io/awesome-bootstrap-checkbox/demo/

We have a UI design company working on a project at the moment and they have done the same thing.

So is a circular checkbox bad UI design?

Answer

We use circular "radio" buttons to indicate there's only one choice available in the group.

Square checkboxes are used to indicate that a more flexible entry is allowed (none, one, or several). Individual choices are checked or unchecked.

If you're allowing none, one, or several options, use square checkboxes.
If you're only allowing one option, use a round option/radio button.

Allowing multiple choices for round checkboxes is just plain confusing.

Refer to the Microsoft guidelines for Radio Buttons for further reading.

With a radio button, users make a choice among a set of mutually exclusive, related options. Users can choose one and only one option. Radio buttons are so called because they function like the channel presets on radios.

With a check box, users make a decision between two clearly opposite choices. The check box label indicates the selected state, whereas the meaning of the cleared state must be the unambiguous opposite of the selected state. Consequently, check boxes should be used only to toggle an option on or off or to select or deselect an item.

In short, radio buttons offer a choice of a set of options (you have to listen to one radio station, you can't choose none or many). Checkboxes allow you a yes/no to each of a set of options.