David Possin wrote as follows. quote
In German it was common to use a macron over m and n to show mm and nn, I saw it being written this way up to the 1970's. But I never saw it used for any other double letters. Dave end quote There is a very interesting document entitled The Gutenberg Press available as a file named gbpmanual.pdf from the Walden Font website. The website address is as follows. http://www.waldenfont.com The address for the file is as follows. http://www.waldenfont.com/public/gbpmanual.pdf On page 14 are some special characters, ligatures and abbreviations, as used by Gutenberg. Searching through the table is great fun so I will only mention here the first entry in the table which shows a letter a with a horizontal line over the top which is stated as "am, an" in the pdf file. The Walden Font website also has some sample fonts showing some of the characters in each font. With the Gutenberg sample some of the special characters with a horizontal line over the top are in the sample. I managed to find them using the Insert Symbol facility of Word 97 on a Windows 98 platform. I have also experimented using WordPad on a Windows 98 platform and found that I could get one of the characters by using Alt+0200. I also managed to get that same character into WordPad on an older Windows 95 PC. I have not referred to the line over the top as a macron as I am not sure whether it is a macron. I say not sure because I am learning and am not sure in that context, not in any way because I am expressing a learned opinion on the matter or anything like that. The document refers to Gutenberg having 290 characters in his typeset. However, the Walden Font font seems not to have that many characters, so perhaps someone might like to say something about Gutenberg's character set please. An email correspondent recently informed me that Gutenberg used a qv ligature. Does anyone know please of what ligatures and abbreviations were used by Gutenberg, if any, which are not in Walden Font font please? I recently saw a television programme in the United Kingdom about Gutenberg not having used a reusable matrix for typecasting but having to make a new matrix for each casting, without the benefit of having a punch to make the matrix. This was discovered by really high magnification of characters in some of Gutenberg's printing. It appears that the type was reused on different pages but that no two versions of the same letter on any given page were congruently identical. William Overington 9 August 2002
