4 ms·
You're not gonna believe this, back in the "old days" people cut fonts out of metal. :) People still do it for fun and profit. The Blue Ox Mill in Oregon has cl
by SavantIdiot 5y ago
You're not gonna believe this, back in the "old days" people cut fonts out of metal. :) People still do it for fun and profit. The Blue Ox Mill in Oregon has classes on fontcutting.
- lisper 5y agoOh, I was well aware of that, but that is just a small part of the story. What I was wondering is the details of the process by which R&W got the ideas out of their heads and into the metal. Surely they didn't carve the typeface by hand themselves?
- coldtea 5y agoWhy would they? There would have been any number of typographers handling such work, and several already working for Cambridge and Oxford books...
- pseudonymcoward 5y agoI believe that they would have written the manuscript, probably by hand but possibly aided by a typewriter, and then given it to a typographer (probably one with experience working on mathematical material) who would have typeset it, cutting any new symbols required. I'm not a historian but this seems like the only plausible process given the technology around at the time.
- dwheeler 5y agoYes, generally the mathematician would write the manuscript & others would turn it into a printable form. IIRC, some people (typographers) created moveable type with math symbols that would then be set in place by a typesetter; if that wouldn't work, a plate for a page would be created. Very expensive & laborious. I believe that the "backward-E" and later the "upside-down-A" are that way because then you did NOT need to create a new metal symbol; you could simply reuse a capital E and A and put them in upside down. I can't find a citation for this. There's other history here: https://jeff560.tripod.com/set.html https://jeff560.tripod.com/set.html