Welcome to the TeXtalk! The special guest for today is our typography guru Yiannis Lazarides, one of the most active members of  TeX.sx, a trusted user (34k+), 231+ badges and 444+ answers so far. Get ready for this great interview!

Paulo Cereda: Could you tell us a bit about you?

Yiannis Lazarides: I am currently Projects Director with a Construction Company operating in the Gulf and stationed in Doha Qatar. I was born in Cyprus, but spent most of my years in South Africa, where I obtained my PhD in Mechanical Engineering under the late Prof. Costa Rallis. As a matter of interest he is the only …

Jeff Atwood, one of the founders of the StackExchange network, chose to mark his last (day-to-day) day at the company with a post disparaging identification questions.  As Jeff pointed out in his post, the story-identification tag is the second most common on our site right now, so I’d like to point out why our community feels that these are a valuable part of the site, where we disagree with Jeff’s viewpoint, and hopefully give you a bit better understanding of how decisions about what’s on-topic are made (and then re-made, and re-made, and …). …

One thing that everyone does on their Mac is write. Whether you’re working on an essay, writing code, or composing an Ask Different answer, you spend time working with text.

I’m one of those people who think that keyboard shortcuts are awesome in general: they allow you to do things much more quickly than you could using the mouse. While entering text, though, keyboard shortcuts are especially important. Since your hands are going to be spending most of the time on the keyboard anyway, switching to the mouse costs even more than usual. …