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I feel when something becomes so ubiquitous, even though it's obviously inferior, it takes a bit more push than one patent - especially if the patent is mainly
by pasabagi 7y ago
I feel when something becomes so ubiquitous, even though it's obviously inferior, it takes a bit more push than one patent - especially if the patent is mainly about encoding, and barely incidentally about typography. And I don't think it's the case that nobody knew capitals were hard on the eyes. The whole reason why lower case letters exist is because roman allcapswithnospaces are horrible.
- jacobolus 7y agoThe people doing professional book design or handwriting long letters and the people designing systems for transmitting occasional short messages long distances had different priorities. A telegram is a short enough message that being hard to read isn’t really a bottleneck. If it costs a day’s wages to send a couple sentences, the recipient is going to be able to spend a couple minutes on figuring out what it says. People weren’t sending novels around by telegraph.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> And I don't think it's the case that nobody knew capitals were hard on the eyes. The whole reason why lower case letters exist is because roman allcapswithnospaces are horrible. As I responded to you elsewhere, the idea that capitals are hard on the eyes is just a myth. All caps with no spaces is bad, but that's because of the missing spaces.