From: "Paul Gilmartin" <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, 10 January 2012 5:17 AM
Yes. The needs were mechanical because of contention between type slugs. I was surprised to learn, circa 1987, that MS Word of that era required the author to specify those ligatures rather than making it a function of the rendering filter. I don't know if it's better now. I suspect that few word processors were ever coupled to mechanical typesetters; the IBM Selectric might have been kind of an exception.
The IBM Selectric Composer was extensively used for typesetting, as it contained an inbuilt editor, coupled to the "Selectric". -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
