By allowing you to replace the existing characters, you can save yourself the hardship of breaking up pre-existing lines and changing the layout. 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. 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.īy now, you may be wondering if Overtype provides any practical purpose nowadays. 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. Overtype, rather than adding another letter, has simply replaced the letter to the immediate right of the letter entered.Īssuming you continued typing with Overtype enabled, it would begin to replace other characters, removing other words in favour of the newer entries. For the second word, “ipsum”, Overtype was used instead. In the above image, there has been an ‘I’ added to “Lorem” using the Insert typing mode. By default, programs like Microsoft Word use the “Insert” typing mode, with “Overtype” being the alternative. If you’ve never encountered this feature, some might consider you lucky.
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