greg.w.h said:

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aggiewilliford said:

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You Had One Job 38

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That's as much as letter spacing issue as a kerning one. Kerning is the spacing between specific pairs of letters. Character spacing affects all letters.

Some of those kinds of inter-letter space "elision" in some fonts and in some cursive writing styles are intentional. But that one isn't. It's just cramming too many letters in.

So…in typewriters most were fixed pitch and that's where fonts like courier (that is a fixed pitch font) came from. The IBM Executive was a proportional space typewriter so each letter had its own pitch where pitch is length of the movement of the carriage induced for the character.

For context from the IBM Electric Typewriter article:

"IBM announced proportional letter spacing for typewriters in 1941, but IBM's World War II effort delayed the introduction of a typewriter model, the Executive, with this capability until 1944. Standard typewriters have a fixed letter pitch, so, for example the letter "i" occupies the same space as the letter "m". The Executive model differed in having a multiple escapement mechanism and four widths for characters, allowing it to simulate 12 point 'ragged right' typesetting. A skilled typist, by carefully counting letters on each line, could even produce fully justified layouts on the Executive."

I repaired Selectrics and Executives for a shop in California as its owner launched a computer store in 1983-84. I then worked at Bb Hunziker's Executive Business Machines part-time in 1984-85 as I finished my BS in Chemistry (the last time I ever touched a test tube.) I also delivered pizza for the two Chanello's franchises that year, taught Sunday School, sang in the adult choir, and went out witnessing at Parkway Baptist every Tuesday. Arguably my favorite year at A&M!

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This was interesting info. Thank you!

aggiewilliford said:

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greg.w.h said:

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aggiewilliford said:

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You Had One Job 38

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That's as much as letter spacing issue as a kerning one. Kerning is the spacing between specific pairs of letters. Character spacing affects all letters.

Some of those kinds of inter-letter space "elision" in some fonts and in some cursive writing styles are intentional. But that one isn't. It's just cramming too many letters in.

So…in typewriters most were fixed pitch and that's where fonts like courier (that is a fixed pitch font) came from. The IBM Executive was a proportional space typewriter so each letter had its own pitch where pitch is length of the movement of the carriage induced for the character.

For context from the IBM Electric Typewriter article:

"IBM announced proportional letter spacing for typewriters in 1941, but IBM's World War II effort delayed the introduction of a typewriter model, the Executive, with this capability until 1944. Standard typewriters have a fixed letter pitch, so, for example the letter "i" occupies the same space as the letter "m". The Executive model differed in having a multiple escapement mechanism and four widths for characters, allowing it to simulate 12 point 'ragged right' typesetting. A skilled typist, by carefully counting letters on each line, could even produce fully justified layouts on the Executive."

I repaired Selectrics and Executives for a shop in California as its owner launched a computer store in 1983-84. I then worked at Bb Hunziker's Executive Business Machines part-time in 1984-85 as I finished my BS in Chemistry (the last time I ever touched a test tube.) I also delivered pizza for the two Chanello's franchises that year, taught Sunday School, sang in the adult choir, and went out witnessing at Parkway Baptist every Tuesday. Arguably my favorite year at A&M!

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This was interesting info. Thank you!

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Thanks. Much of the font mechanics are built into either word processors or font definitions and hints which are programmatic today.

I worked with a team of Texas A&M graduates who produced as far as we are aware the first Adobe PostScript clone embedded in a printer. It was like hardware version of Ghostscript if you've ever used that. Ghostscript was like Didplay Postscript that NeXT used or Sun's NEWS in the sense of displaying Postscript instead of printing it.

Later NeXT came to a bid I helped butcher Air Force (and by extension DoD) and asked to be included in our bid. I had to explain why we couldn't in their primary conference room with a darkened window overhead. I imagined Steve was in that room listening and likely seething. He was absolutely huge on printing and fonts by the way based on an early love of calligraphy and aesthetics and demanded his product be aesthetically pleasing.

After that meeting at NeXT Scully was tossed at Apple and they hired Jobs avd he merged NeXT into Apple and MacOS leveraged NeXT os work including NextStep and OpenStep operating systems. Until Ventura Preview could open postscript files (which are in a Turing-complete language) natively likely somewhat based on Display Postscript from the NeXT / Adobe development. Today Preview on Mac only handles ODF files which use internal Embedded PostScript (EPS).

There are ways to convert a ps file to pdf at least in MacOS Ventura which is now relatively ancient.

https://robservatory.com/open-postscript-files-in-preview-in-macos-ventura/

greg.w.h said:

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aggiewilliford said:

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greg.w.h said:

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aggiewilliford said:

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You Had One Job 38

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That's as much as letter spacing issue as a kerning one. Kerning is the spacing between specific pairs of letters. Character spacing affects all letters.

Some of those kinds of inter-letter space "elision" in some fonts and in some cursive writing styles are intentional. But that one isn't. It's just cramming too many letters in.

So…in typewriters most were fixed pitch and that's where fonts like courier (that is a fixed pitch font) came from. The IBM Executive was a proportional space typewriter so each letter had its own pitch where pitch is length of the movement of the carriage induced for the character.

For context from the IBM Electric Typewriter article:

"IBM announced proportional letter spacing for typewriters in 1941, but IBM's World War II effort delayed the introduction of a typewriter model, the Executive, with this capability until 1944. Standard typewriters have a fixed letter pitch, so, for example the letter "i" occupies the same space as the letter "m". The Executive model differed in having a multiple escapement mechanism and four widths for characters, allowing it to simulate 12 point 'ragged right' typesetting. A skilled typist, by carefully counting letters on each line, could even produce fully justified layouts on the Executive."

I repaired Selectrics and Executives for a shop in California as its owner launched a computer store in 1983-84. I then worked at Bb Hunziker's Executive Business Machines part-time in 1984-85 as I finished my BS in Chemistry (the last time I ever touched a test tube.) I also delivered pizza for the two Chanello's franchises that year, taught Sunday School, sang in the adult choir, and went out witnessing at Parkway Baptist every Tuesday. Arguably my favorite year at A&M!

---

This was interesting info. Thank you!

---

Thanks. Much of the font mechanics are built into either word processors or font definitions and hints which are programmatic today.

I worked with a team of Texas A&M graduates who produced as far as we are aware the first Adobe PostScript clone embedded in a printer. It was like hardware version of Ghostscript if you've ever used that. Ghostscript was like Didplay Postscript that NeXT used or Sun's NEWS in the sense of displaying Postscript instead of printing it.

Later NeXT came to a bid I helped butcher Air Force (and by extension DoD) and asked to be included in our bid. I had to explain why we couldn't in their primary conference room with a darkened window overhead. I imagined Steve was in that room listening and likely seething. He was absolutely huge on printing and fonts by the way based on an early love of calligraphy and aesthetics and demanded his product be aesthetically pleasing.

After that meeting at NeXT Scully was tossed at Apple and they hired Jobs avd he merged NeXT into Apple and MacOS leveraged NeXT os work including NextStep and OpenStep operating systems. Until Ventura Preview could open postscript files (which are in a Turing-complete language) natively likely somewhat based on Display Postscript from the NeXT / Adobe development. Today Preview on Mac only handles ODF files which use internal Embedded PostScript (EPS).

There are ways to convert a ps file to pdf at least in MacOS Ventura which is now relatively ancient.

https://robservatory.com/open-postscript-files-in-preview-in-macos-ventura/

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You have witnessed a lot! That is great tech history.

The things I've seen!!! Dan Rather's claims about paperwork he had on George W. Bush were shredded by the fact the document copy he shared was done with a modern word processor and doctored to look like an older document. No commonly available typewriter used by the military at the time the document supposedly was created did proportional spacing or kerning. There were some selectric-style typesetters that could do some of the features but not the kerning.

I know that one!

I need to put going to Gregory on my bucket list…

I can't count the number of miles I drove on that road in the 5 years i lived in Corpus.

My cat Artemis was found on the side of this road during rush hour traffic when she was 3 weeks old.

greg.w.h said:

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The things I've seen!!! Dan Rather's claims about paperwork he had on George W. Bush were shredded by the fact the document copy he shared was done with a modern word processor and doctored to look like an older document. No commonly available typewriter used by the military at the time the document supposedly was created did proportional spacing or kerning. There were some selectric-style typesetters that could do some of the features but not the kerning.

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Oh the things I learned later...So much we thought we had a good bead on, but not so much...
Funny what we come to understand with time.

I was shocked that I fully understood what was going on when they happened.

34 days!

(Let me know when you see it…)

Aggie Therapist said:

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34 days!

(Let me know when you see it…)

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tres tres

You Had One Job 32