Technical Newspaper Question

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

I wonder if anybody who has worked on newspapers can answer this.

As an example, I came across a Herald article recently titled “Dunedin
prepares for 10pc population increase over next 30 years”.

The question is: why do newspapers use “pc” as their abbreviation for
“percent” instead of the more usual “%” character?

The latter character has been standard on computer keyboards for
decades ... essentially since newspapers first discovered computers. Does
it have some special meaning in their markup system, or something? Don’t
they have fonts that can print it? (Aren’t they using the same computer-
based fonts as everybody else, by now?)

[Willy Nilly]

On Wed, 31 Jan 2024, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@nz.invalid> wrote:
>The question is: why do newspapers use “pc” as their abbreviation for
>“percent” instead of the more usual “%” character?

This probably is a tradition from the ink-on-paper days when newsprint
did not print fine characters well, and "%" is a fine character. If
it doesn't print well, it could be illegible to the readers.

Similarly, the word "FLICK" (in caps) was avoided...