Frances to William and others... It is interesting to peer over the wall at this stuff from the wings. If you will permit me to jump in with some ideas that are still rough, your further comments may help me to sort this haze out.
In my sign research most semioticians who study literal verbal statements in scripture or literature tend to hold that texts, whether they are manually lettered by hand or mechanically typeset by machine, should be visible and legible and readable; and even better if they are somewhat semantically analogous with their carried content. In terms of formal iconic similarity, all forms are held by sign theorists to be immediately like some object, even if that "referred" object is a mere quality of emotive feeling; and this in spite of the best efforts of the writer or designer to avoid it. Even scientists who regularly scan and read graphs are held to be affected by the shapes and colors of lines and labels, even if they deny it. At the level of culture and society it might also be argued pragmatically that the typographic designer who makes type or who uses type is kind of entrusted with something unique that establishes and maintains the substance of an essence for peoples. My thought here perhaps turns to anthropology and ethnology and to philology. All the recent messages on this current topic from list posters have not yet been fully digested by me, but will be soon, because of their apparent usefulness to me in my own semiotic pursuits. PS On a point of clarification, when you refer to sign theory do you mean the angloamerican "semiotics" as posited by realists and pragmatists like Peirce or Morris, or the francoeuropean "semiology" as posited by linguists and structuralists like Saussure or Barthes. It often confusingly occurs in the literature that semiologists like Eco will use the word "semiotics" to mean their semiological sign theory.
