Boiling lead and black art: a history of mathematical typography (2017)(practicallyefficient.com)

9 pointsby sillybilly2 tahun yang lalu1 comments

Boiling lead and black art: a history of mathematical typography (2017)

http://www.practicallyefficient.com/2017/10/13/from-boiling-lead-and-black-art.html

2 comments

Taniwha2 tahun yang lalu

Spent some time around Linotype machines in the 70s, my Dad left school to operate them at 15 (to support his family in the 30s), they were still in use at the local paper until the 80s when everything was computerised. So give some love to the Lino machines too! While they were not suitable for typesetting math they were perfectly good for doing a newspaper - and could be driven from paper tape. Fixing mistakes was easy, just retype a line.

Mechanically they were also brilliant, a mechanical type sorter, and mechanical analog justification (spaces were wedged shape, once a line was typed the mechanism would press on the wedges and jam the type into a line width hole pushing the words equally apart).

Finally: the brass type blanks were readable (forwards), the cast lines of type backwards (my Dad could read them), they were set into full pages by the subeditors who would add headlines/pics, a full page paper matrix was cast over them (forwards, correct way around, readable), and that would be pulled into a half circle and a reversed metal curved plate would be cast into that (backwards), finally 2 plates would be bolted to either side of a roller in the press and once all the pages were there they would run the press producing readable (forwards) text on paper

In those days the (evening) paper would have multiple editions, what it really meant was that they redid a few of the rollers on the press and kept the rest (classifieds etc) the same, sports edition added a few more rollers/pages - evening papers died thanks to TV news

[deleted]2 tahun yang lalu