Tag: Typography
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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…
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Bravo for STRUCTURE.
I’ve been bitching about the 1990s switch from rational organized discourse to random chaotic psychopath discourse. In the modern torture chamber ordinary people are flayed. We’re accustomed to these rapid whiplashes, and our responses are also chaotic. Mainly we’re just numb, but when the cat-of-infinite-tails bashes one of our raw nerves, we screech and bite.…
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Still more Zenith musings
The Zenith memory pulled me back into those first few months after release from prison. I was appreciating freedom, but I was starting out on the wrong track AGAIN. What was the wrong track? COLLEGE, and especially college courses in physics and math. College drove me crazy, drove me into hopeless depression which led inevitably…
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Preserved
Vintage.es has a feature on Port Washington, LI in the ’40s. Lots of interesting architecture, from old New England to the latest postwar houses with attached garages. This magnificent building especially caught my eye: A Studie dealer at 145 Main St, with a ’42 Champion in front. I couldn’t resist checking Googlestreet. Normally a downtown…
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Reviewing Aberree, part 1/7
Since I had to switch away from cancellable Blogspot, I’m taking the opportunity to review and condense several long-running topics. Condensing is important. Most topics continued in scattered form for many months, with gradual learning and adjusting as I wrote and studied and animated. “Correction” footnotes often turned into correct understanding. The final result wasn’t…
Polistra's Mill 