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Joined: Oct 2000
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346 |
we refer to a specific font family (all the letters, numbers, signs etc in that font)
>lax usage
Using HTML styles you can assign a "font-family" to particular items or pages or whatever. But in this context you would have something like
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif
If the browser machine didn't have the Verdana font available it would use Arial; if it didn't have Arial it would use whatever sans serif font it happened to have around.
So a font family is whatever the Web developer considers a group of equivalent fonts.
An even more lax usage, shanks!
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Joined: Nov 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
In reply to:
VER-ry in-ter-es-ting! (Sgt. Schultz) Thanks Father Steve. It's been awhile since I actually saw a type case. By the way, the well made, wooden boxes even when ink-stained are highly collectable...and handy, too. Wish I had one of the old ones that were thrown on rubbish heaps when papers went, wholesale, to Linotypes. Sigh, WOW
My trip to parts north kept me out of a very interesting exchange of views, obviously.
I actually have a drawer from a california type case (the "C" in california was never capitalised to my knowledge). And since the california cases held both upper and lower case for anything under (from memory) about 30pt type, "upper case" and "lower case" must have a much older lineage, although the general idea is correct.
The bane of any printing apprentice's existence was having to "dis" the handset type back into the type cases ("dis" being a highly technical contraction of "disassemble"). I did it as an apprentice and journeyman for, ooh, two years on and off. One of my fellow apprentices found it much more convenient to throw the lot out of one of the windows into the scrub behind the building.
Interestingly (perhaps), the linotype moulds for each letter were always called "mats", short for "matrices". I never did work out why. Maybe Merganthaler wanted them to sound more grand than they were. They were always kept in "mat cases". "Dissing" had a slightly different meaning when applied to linotypes - it referred to the mechanical redistribution of the mats back into the mat cases from the disser bar. Damned bar jammed every five minutes on older machines, and the poor muggins operator was constantly getting up and down to clear the jam, the front and back splashes (molten type metal does make a mess) and, in one memorable case, to bash the cam gears (massive, cast iron wheels rotating on a central shaft) back into synch with a piece of four by two ...
Them were the days, all right!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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There were actually two sieges of Vienna by the Turks, one in 1529 and the other in 1683. So which one are we talking about here?
Bingley
Bingley
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981 |
>which one are we talking about here?
For everyday purposes I prefer to refer to the seige of 1529, a more every-day kind of siege. Otherwise I prefer to mention the siege of 1683, such a sad occasion don't you think? I cried for days.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
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But such a relief when it was relieved.
Bingley
Bingley
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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But so few people know just how the relief occurred.
Vienna was slowly starving -- another week and they would be forced to surrender to the marauding Turks. But the general officer of a relieving army went twenty miles upstream and released huge quantities of fish into the river. When the fish reached the city, the people were able to haul them in and sustain themselves for that crucial week it took the army to reach them.
Grateful artisans carved a large wall mural to memorialize the general and his ingenuity. It was the first instance in that part of Europe of bass relief.
TEd
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
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Interestingly (perhaps), the linotype moulds for each letter were always called "mats", short for "matrices". I never did work out why.
I can rarely be bothered to look up on-line dictionaries, so this comes off the top of my head. If I remember rightly, a matrix (besides its tabular mathematical use) primarily refers to a medium into which material (or shapes in this case) can be embedded. The contractions to mats is presumably simply jargon.
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Joined: Nov 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
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In reply to:
If I remember rightly, a matrix (besides its tabular mathematical use) primarily refers to a medium into which material (or shapes in this case) can be embedded. The contractions to mats is presumably simply jargon.
You're probably quite right. I guess what I meant was, why weren't they called "moulds".
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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... and why california, since this was hardly the world centre of early printing, was it, or was linotype specifically linked somehow?
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