If you’ve ever downloaded a job application or similar with fields for text denoted by ‘_’ Overtype can be massively beneficial. It does, but its aid is mostly confined to a few specific niches. Where should it be used?īy now, you may be wondering if Overtype provides any practical purpose nowadays. We created a basic table with the letter ‘e’ and the ‘|’ character, but you could use one letter or symbol and achieve the same result. A general shape could be constructed using any letter or combination of letters that you wanted, then filler symbols could be replaced with something appropriate. Overtype would allow you to replace characters in a line you had already written to see if it would claw back a few extra characters or disappear off-screen.īeyond this you could also create a basic layout or table with a monospaced font, then modify the fields using Overtype. Word wrapping didn’t exist in every program, so knowing how many characters you had to work with was valuable. Each and every line runs off-screen after fifty-three characters. In our example above, we’ve repeated the first four letters of the alphabet. Monospace fonts make it possible to know just how many letters fill a line. We’ve already covered what makes them interesting in a more detailed article, but essentially, every glyph is designed to be the same size. Perhaps twenty years ago you wouldn’t have had the same choice of fonts and typefaces – monospaced fonts were the choices you were given and the choices you lived with. Word processors have felt like polished, perfected pieces of software for a long time, but this was not always the case. Assuming you continued typing with Overtype enabled, it would begin to replace other characters, removing other words in favour of the newer entries.

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