Posted on 09/10/2004 3:54:17 PM PDT by TC Rider
Wasn't that what they wanted to do the original "home row" as, but found that it was to efficient and typists were tangling up their strike keys??
If for some reason the operator had to produce a couple of slugs for the end of a story, he might simply run his finger down the right hand row of keys -- whoever said this was faster than a typewriter was right about that, it could drop matrices in sequence no matter how fast you ripped a finger across the keys. The result was:
ETOIN
SHRDLU
ETOIN
SHRDLU
I'm satisfied.
So, who was on Opray today?
I got to get me one of those!
Hey! Wait a minute! Isn't that John O'Neill (not Killian) sitting at the machine??? I demand an immediate independent investigation!
Well, it could be done by a craftsman printer, but on a very limited basis -- and it wouldn't be true kerning as the term is understood with today's rubber-type tech.
Say you had a biblical verse that began with a drop cap "T", with the descender covering, say, five lines. Well, you could set up the job so that the body type was laid in under the T and you could space out each line to justify left and right with "em" and "en" thins to alter the width of the spaces.
My dad was a jobbing printer and I grew up setting wedding invitations etc. and printing them on a foot-operated platten. It was an astonishly demanding craft and, despite the utility of computer typesetting, we're poorer for the loss of those arcane skills, if only in for the satisfaction of doing a first-rate job by eye, hand, and wit.
What was even harder was writing newspaper headlines in hot metal, especially if you worked for a paper that liked a tight fit on the decks. Screams at edition time if the hed you wrote bounced. Today, you just condense and kern it.
I have two references for that. First, I believe it was the nonsense string used to indicate the break between two stories. Second, there was a humor writer who used a story line about a cat and a mouse that lived in the composition room and wrote satire at night and this was his tagline but I can't remember names.
I did, however use the IBM Compositor back in 1974, the only possible device that would have produced the kerned, proportional spacing in the memo but not the superscript.
Humor at its best. Thank you!
APf
You could always tell a linotype operator, they always had burn marks on their hands and arms from the hot lead that would sometimes shoot out. Heck of a piece of equipment though, an engineering marvel in its time.
I'm pretty certain this is it....
Just remembered the names of the cat and mouse,(see my earlier reply) Archie and Mehetebel. Ring and bells?
Wrong. Designed my Stanley Morison for the Times of London in 1931. (I think on a previous thread I said it was Morris Benton--whoops.) Released by Mergenthaler Linotype shortly after.
Oh, thanks
I know as a long-time typist, that some keys in older typewriters had a tendency to cut the paper. Depending on what kind of paper was used, the originals might show slices in the paper made by the keys as they struck the paper. I know for a fact that the letter "l" used to slice into the paper on some, and the "o" key would sometimes cause the center paper of the "o" to be cut cleanly through and fall out. This would also happen with periods, commas, and some number keys.
The fourth document, a memorandum to Lt. Bush, if it indeed was sent to him, there should have been a copy of this memo in his military record file. There wasn't.
If Jerry Killian didn't type as his wife claims, then how does a man who doesn't type, know how to center the heading on a memo, and type consistently and correctly, with no errors or misspellings? I've been typing since 1962, and consider myself pretty fast and accurate, but I still make errors regularly, and if Killian was that good without being a typist, then I must have missed something all these years.
At the moment, Rather is handling all of this the same way Kerry is handling the questions about his military record. Both he and Rather believe they don't have to provide any original documents or records. They want us to just trust them and take them at their word. That only works for a little while.
When headlines were set using a machine that used a photo process, which I think started in the mid fifties, type kerning became a real possibilty, as did special effects.
Body type, when still set in lead, made do with combinations of characters called ligatures instead of kerning. Ligatures where combinations of letters like t and h, or f and l, and the like. Photo typesetting, using negative images of type stored on glass or film or trasnmitted by CRTs, made kerning possible on text.
When computers began to take over the typesetting business in the early 70s, kerning became widespread before moving to PCs (and by that I mean the Macintosh) in the 80s.
Thanks much. Very interesting. From time to time it must even have helped squeeze a headline into the alloted space.
I came in at the end of this era, but it was fascinating to see these craftsmen at work. Now everybody with a computer is producing flyers and newsletters, and the results sometimes make my eyes bleed.
#76 has some good info on kearning that was done in newspaper headlines.
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