On 22 Oct 2006 at 19:11, Noel Stoutenburg wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > But it's the numbers *without* descenders, and that all have the > > same width that are the aberration in the history of typesetting, > > because they were created for computer use, so you type columns of > > numbers in your word processing documents and have then line up. > > Type with uniform widths for each character were _not_ created for > computer use. And they're older than Schole's invention, the > typewriter, too. I've seen two hundred year old books with numbers > aligned in columns, and while the characters themselves may not be of > constant width, the bodies upon which they were cast, were.
Did you read the rest of my post? You must have, since it continued on from exactly where you cut your quotation. I said: > I don't know what traditional typesetting did for that. I presume > they had special numbers for columnar layouts that were not used > except in columnar layouts, and the regular variable-width numbers > with descenders were used everywhere else. The computer "innovation" was having nothing *but* fixed-width numbers, whereas older fonts had both for use in different contexts. Computer fonts with both are becoming more common, but for 15 years or so, we lacked them in most of the common fonts. *That* is vastly different from traditional typography and was the result of a decision probably based on the original 256-character limit to a font set. That was entirely a computer-based limitation, one that traditional typesetting did not have to deal with. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
