On 23 Oct 2006 at 10:28, Mark D Lew wrote: > On Oct 23, 2006, at 5:45 AM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > The computer "innovation" was having nothing *but* fixed-width > > numbers, whereas older fonts had both for use in different contexts. > > Thanks for the clarification, David.
It's not a clarification. It's a repetition of what I said originally. > I did read your first post carefully and was confused by it. Your > statement that numeral descenders and fixed-width numerals are "an > aberration in the history of typesetting" That is exactly the opposite of what I was saying. The *lack* of those in modern fonts is the abberation. What I wrote was: > But it's the numbers *without* descenders, and that all have the > same width that are the aberration in the history of typesetting So, I said just the opposite of what you paraphrased above. > sounded to me like a claim > that they hadn't existed before, which was hard to square with your > statement later in the same paragraph that you didn't know what was > done before. How could I have emphasized the word "without" any more than I did? > My suspicion is that most fonts (in the original sense of the word) > had either fixed-width numerals or variable-width, depending on the > intended use of the font, with fonts having the choice of both the > rarity. I'm trying to research that, and if I learn anything > definitive I'll let you know. It seems to me that, on the 19th century > mechanical typesetters (linotype, etc), even if you had either kind of > numerals to choose from, you'd still have to choose one or the other > to load, just like we did with phototypesetters in the 1980s. Perhaps, but at least the fonts had the characters there to be used. With the limitation to 256 characters, early computer fonts didn't have room for the numeric variants unless they sacrificed foreign language support. Or, at least, that's my guess as to why computer fonts tend to have only fixed-width numerals. -- 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
