Tag: Typography
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π Day
Keeping up a tradition… π Day again! Since I’m talking typography lately, I’ll hash and rehash a couple items from 2019. = = = = = Thinking about Trump as Pied Piper. When the metaphor first appeared in those DNC emails I didn’t quite understand it. After learning that Trump is Roy Cohn’s protege, I…
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Novative Ruption
In sync with my recent items about the history of Standard Register and the history of Electrotyping, and in sync with previous item about Bible IP, received an email just now from Monotype. I vaguely remember buying a license for a computer font LONG ago, maybe 2004. At that time I was trying to sell…
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Features
It’s fashionable to mock Youtube Shorts and Tiktok as catering to modern short attention spans. True except for modern. Entertainment has always provided brief moments and quick distractions for people who can’t devote several hours of intense concentration to a novel or an opera or a Gone With The Wind. Lately I’ve been talking about…
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Zenith leftover
(Redated and reposted) This duplex should have gone in the Zenith set. At that time I showed the Trans-Oceanic in a generic house. Now I’ve made the proper duplex, so will more or less repeat the text with proper pictures. The duplex also has a coffee connection and a printing connection, so it does fit…
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Bootstrapping a language
Okie blogger K. Latham posted an interesting brief feature on the Cherokee Advocate, a weekly paper in Tahlequah that was first founded in 1844. I had noticed several early tribal newspapers in the Ayer newspaper lists but hadn’t stopped to think about the alphabet and fonts. I asked some questions about the source of the…
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Pratt’s Pterotype 2 of 3
Pratt’s US patent, issued in 1868, is titled Mechanical Typographer but he normally called his machine the Pterotype for unknown reasons. It wasn’t notably wingy. Here’s how it looked in operation: Each key had a long lever pivoted in the middle of the machine, and each lever activated three separate horizontal bars. All letters were…
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Pratt’s Pterotype 3 of 3
Returning to both Sholes and Hammond. Sholes and Glidden didn’t use Pratt’s keyboard at first. Like most early typewriters they followed the piano model. They also used an entirely different way of getting each letter to the paper, with individual hammers bearing each letter. Oddity: Glidden and Sholes sold their idea to gunmaker Remington, but…
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The father of boilerplate
Previously I covered the Army Press, a simple manual press that could handle newspaper-size stock. The Army Press helped country weeklies to survive until they could afford more automatic presses. Reviewing the Army Press: It looked like a proof press. On the proof press, the paper is clamped to the roller, which rolls and slides…
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Today is
Today is Learn about Compositing Day! Oh boy! Chases, quoins, imposing stones, ludlows, forms, slugs, pica poles, friskets, proofreading… Oh. After proofreading, today is Learn About Composting Day. Poop.
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π
π Day again! Since I’m talking typography lately, I’ll hash and rehash a couple items from 2019. = = = = = Thinking about Trump as Pied Piper. When the metaphor first appeared in those DNC emails I didn’t quite understand it. After learning that Trump is Roy Cohn’s protege, I understand it PRECISELY. Agents…
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Anyone could own?
Last week I was trying to show that one individual has always been powerless against the rulers, but an organization or union has always been capable of pushing back against demons. 4. Before Hollerith, record-keeping and calculation were partly mechanized by printing presses and typewriters and abacuses and cash registers. Anyone could own an adding…
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Another non-fix
Continuing the theme of the opportunity cost and wasted passion in the bitcoin realm. Here’s another misplaced non-solution. NFType proposes using NFTs to clean up the messy copyright situation of digital fonts. Or at least I think that’s what they’re proposing. The website and the Twitter version are totally uninformative and incomprehensible. Font licensing is…
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Impressive and depressive
Now that I’ve got the dull parts of the new courseware version out of the way (switching out images to adjust for changes in DRM) I’m returning to the fun part. I’m reviving and modernizing some complex programs I wrote in the ’90s, so they can be presented as ‘accessories’ to the courseware. The impressive…
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Cranks and eccentrics
Note: This was posted last month and I finally got around to making the correct battery for Morse’s original. I’m reposting at today’s date to add the battery, and ALSO because WordPress did some suspiciously weird ‘optimizing’ on one of the animations. (It looked OK when first published.) Looks like they’re trying to gradually erase…
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Sorry about the messy format
I was screwing around with WordPress themes, trying to get tags to appear at the bottom of the post as they did in Blogspot. Now I’ve got the tags (by accident!), but the fonts and headers are messed up, and the top image is somehow minimized. Well, the tags were the goal, so I guess…
