Re: I'M AN AMERICAN!

Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

Yeah, that's how I had it listed in my head - and furniture ain't a
fo[u]nt, so I got confused.

The type is sorted into matching sets, naturally, so you have one
place to go for all the 'Baskerville 12 point' and another place to
go for all the 'London Transport 48' and so on (or whatever the
different type-faces are called in your particular establishment).

Yep. Although you might well have separate drawers (or maybe even
`cases') for upper and lower case.

A really big printing shop would have whole rooms ...

Oh yes, but you'd want `all that style of type' in the one place.

Quite; and a lot of trouble if someone managed to get the Gill Sans and
the Times Roman mixed up!

<chuckle> Yes, but you could at least sort those two from each other
fairly easily.

[...]

There's a difference between a 'fount' and a 'font'; philosophically, a
font is a passive container but a fount is an active producer of a flow of
something (which you'd get if you dropped one ...). As you say, the fount
is the tray of little bits; the font is the container of trays.

I've never come across that usage before, and it's not back up by the
Concise Oxford Dictionary 8th edition (1990). Fowler's Modern English
Usage is no help on this one, Partridge's Usage and abusage told me some
entertaining things about `Johnsonese' but nothing about fo[u]nt. The
Oxford Guide to English Usage didn't help either.

`Case' is the name for the `actual drawer containing the type' (`a
partitioned receptacle for type' is what COD 8th ed says). No
indication of what you call the `thing you put the cases into when
you're not using them'.

I've drawn a blank here, I'm afraid.

I suspect that not all jargon finds it way into the OED.

Lots and lots doesn't, as I've often found.

I'm pulling this
out of my memory of the terms used in my Grandfather's printing shop
(which was a moveable-type outfit with a bit of offset-litho). The jargon
may have had regional or other variations; I imagine Fleet St was a world
of its own in that respect as well as all others.

Can't argue with any of that. I expect that he was right for a useful
value of `right'.

[snip]

When using lumps of metal to impress the characters onto
paper, each lump had to be designed and made seperately so there was
little reason not to vary the proportions and details to best aesthetic
effect for the particular size.

Yep.

Thing is, there's very little reason not to do that with computer type.
The problem is the user interface and getting people to use the type
sensibly - with LaTeX most especially, the computer handled all the
tricky stuff.

Which is how it should be, of course. The whole 'Word Processor' concept
is fundamentally flawed.

Yep.

Having been shown the light by you in the past,
I am determined to master Lyx, at least,

Umm. You might find it easier to use straight LaTeX for some things,
you know. The markup's not that hard to learn about; but you really do
need to buy a book or two (if you get really `in' to it, I could
recommend four that are dead useful). The on-line documentation is
pretty good these days, but doesn't cover everything.

<http://www.eijkhout.net/tbt/> if you want hard-core TeX documentation -
it's a free download of a very good book.

and dump the WP part of Open
Office (apart from making sense out of all those MS Word 'documents' some
people insist on attaching to their emails or using to publish
'information packs' etc from web sites - national and local government
departments included).

Oh yeah. All that crap...

Being MacSmug here, I can use Textedit (the sawn-off WP Apple provides
with the OS that can work as a plain text editor, a basic WP, or even a
very crude HTML editor) - plug in the marvellous `Antiwordservice' and
any OSX-native-API-Mac-text-editing-app can open MS Word files.

(specificially, Cocoa text editing apps can open MS Word files; Cocoa is
the name of the API developed for OS X. Carbon is the `semi-backwards
compatible API' which can't use services. Classic is `MacOS 9 running
alongside OS X' that doesn't work with MacOS X 10.5 or Intel Macs.
There's a Java API built in too. And don't ask me what else 'cos they
just keep piling stuff on, but there should be APIs called Cockup and
Conspiracy if you ask me.)

Eventually, as computer-power and storage
gets better, there will be a return to the true craftsmanship of printing
and typeface design.

It's got nothing to do with computer power and storage: I was doing it
the proper way back in the 1980s on my baby brother's 80286 MS-DOS PC
with a 20MB HDD and 4MB RAM.

Not on an industrial scale, I suspect.

Well, no, but there was no reason at all why it couldn't have been the
source of the file that was sent to the image-setter to create the film
used to make the printing plate used for full-on industrial printing,
which is all you'd expect from the computer that prepared the final
layout. After all, I generated a PS file to send to the printer we used
for real.

Even back then, we had dvi-PostScript drivers - imagesetters always used
to munch on PS, and while they might do pdf *as well* these days, I
can't see they'd drop PS.

As it was, we had a 4ppm 300dpi laser printer.

(I had a John Bull rubber-type
printing outfit, but I wouldn't call it /printing/ exactly ...).

Well, no. Hmm. We had one of them - not very impressive, really.

[snip]

and the
printing room was huge and gloomy and filled with big machines, tanks,
pipes, conveyor-belts, chutes, whirring wheels and rollers, and all sorts
of dangerous and exciting looking things.

I've seen shots of the interiors in films and suchlike. That's one
reason I'd've loved to have seen in person.

I'd be surprised if any are still in use, although there could be a museum
somewhere that goes 'live' sometimes. The whole thing is at least as
worth keeping as steam railway engines and Lancashire cotton spinning and
weaving mills.

They've got some pretty big Adana printing presses at the Manchester
Museum of Science and Industry - big for Adana presses, which are small
hand-operated, flat bed, single *** jobs. No rotary presses or
Linotype machines or similar that I know of, though. Plenty of spinning
machinery, mind. Not sure about weaving.

Entangled amongst all that lot
were men (no women)

<grin> A very tightly closed shop, they were, weren't they?

Locked closed. They called it a 'chapel', even.

The NUJ still calls its branches `chapels' - or used to in the 1990s,
anyway.

[snip]

Apart from the actual putting-it-onto-paper stage, it's probably all
tucked away inside a little grey box somewhere now. Sad, in a way, but
much safer and cheaper to operate. Also in full glorious
smudgey-fog-colour too of course.

Not quite - it's still fairly normal to have writers who pass copy
(typed up on computer, naturally) to layout people who `do that DTP
thang' on their own boxes of tricks.

Small boxes (lots smaller than a shed the size of a soccer pitch, anyway)
and quite probably grey, or beige. Quiet too.

Ah, yes, sorry, I get you now.

But then you need to get the
result into a form that the printer can handle and I suspect that's
still working as it did a decade back: you have an `image-setter', which
is a very high res printer that prints on huge sheets of photographic
film - the one I saw used to kick out `two A4 pages on one ***' with
big borders. It was an impressive beastie kept in a dark room, although
I suspect modern versions are less impressive. Okay, it's nothing like
as impressive or Satanic as the old fashioned way, but it's still a
serious beast and does something real.

... Then the photo is used to create a lithographic 'stone' (probaly metal
these days)

Yes; there are ways of doing it with plastic - cheaper, for short runs.

which is what gets loaded into the printing press, which must
still be a big noisy giant of a machine.

Yep - I missed out visiting the printing works when I was scribbling,
which I regret.

[snip]

The counting tool's name became applied to the thing being
counted too. It would be more accurate to say 'numerical' to describe
what computers do, but it's probably too late now.

Ah, bollocks to all that - I'm Just Not Having It. If people mean
`computerised', why not just say so? Why muck about with idiotic wrong
terms?

That's people for you.

Yeah (he glowered, darkly), they'll have me to deal with if they keep it
up.

Rowland.


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