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>Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote i
by prvc 5y ago
>Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.
Even using a movable type system, I don't see why matching a specific number of characters, rather than lines would be necessary.
- mandmandam 5y ago9,049 character without spaces, 10,862 with. What an odd line to add in - perhaps it's intended as a thematic pun, considering we're talking about a measure of character?
- solarmist 5y agoOh! That wouldn't have occurred to me. Great thought.
- isx726552 5y agoYeah that doesn’t really make sense. Print is always measured in physical units: pages, columns, inches, etc. Type can be adjusted to fill this much space, so the character and even word counts are somewhat flexible. There are of course limits to the amount of adjustment that can be made, but even with none at all, proportional fonts means exact character counts would not be the right unit of measure to ensure a piece of writing fit an allotted amount of space.