16 ms·

Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?

• barrysteve 4y ago
  These bar charts are confusing. Development in Book Prices and Productivity Pages printed per day: Europe Cheapest book: biggest bar The years go forward but you want to read it backwards to understand it's meaning. Size of Largest Book Collection no y axis, just text written on random bars. big year gaps that don't really add to the narrative. I get you're retelling the paragraph you wrote before in a visual format. It's hard to read and doesn't add much.
  • ascar 4y ago
    > The years go forward but you want to read it backwards to understand it's meaning. I don't really get what you mean with that. Prices dropped rappidly within 60 years. Bar graphs are maybe not the best pick here, but I definitely read this graph forward to understand its meaning.
• trinovantes 4y ago
  I suspect only needing to learn a dozen alphanumeric characters vs hundreds/thousands of unique characters also helped literacy
  • WalterBright 4y ago
    We're going back to hundreds/thousands of unique characters. See the growth of icons and emojis, and Unicode's rush to invent endless new "characters".
    • Mordisquitos 4y ago
      Lucky our printing technology has moved past moveable type and mechanical typesetting in recent years. My printer is not that new and can already print all extended Latin characters and maybe even some emojis.
      • WalterBright 4y ago
        From time to time, people ask for D to support Unicode operator code points. I decided it wasn't a good idea, as it makes code more difficult to type in, and there's the problem of text processing programs' (like editors, printers, etc.) support for non-ASCII being rather unpredictable. > maybe even some I.e. unreliable :-/
      • thrown_22 4y ago
        Change is not progress. It took millennia for us to go from emojis to characters and the few societies that did ended up dominating the world because of the increases in efficiency. Now we're heading in the other direction because literacy is too hard.
    • funcDropShadow 4y ago
      Unicode is primarily concerned with standardizing existing characters in the majority of the language systems of the world. The big exception are emojis and a small number of usefull icons, the power button icon comes to mind. Its story of addition to unicoe was shared on Hacker News some years ago. As far as I know the only area of invention and growth are emojis.
    • bregma 4y ago
      If this were true, the first page of every book would consist of nothing but special glyphs for product placement.
    • crazygringo 4y ago
      Obviously we're not. Icons and emoji aren't characters -- you don't need them to write words and their meanings are relatively self-evident as opposed to letters where you have to learn how to pronounce an otherwise mostly arbitrary squiggle. And aside from emoji (which is demand-driven), Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.
      • thematrixturtle 4y ago
        Here are the Chinese characters for concave and convex: 凹凸 Care to take a stab at the difference between these and emoji?
        • elurg 4y ago
          Very few Chinese characters are pictograms and even those are extremely stylized. The vast majority are complex compounds of smaller radicals. They are nothing like emoji.
          • thematrixturtle 4y ago
            No, they're both on the same continuum. The original Chinese characters were emoji, which literally means "picture characters" in Japanese, and emoji today are already evolving beyond their original pictorial meanings -- for example, an eggplant isn't just an eggplant anymore.
            • crazygringo 4y ago
              > The original Chinese characters were emoji This is one of the most absurd things I have ever read, but in an extremely funny way! I think you're trying to make the argument that both Chinese characters and emoji are pictographs. Yes, a few Chinese characters originated as pictographs (a tiny minority of them), and emoji are one form of pictograph, but that... doesn't make Chinese characters emoji, not even "the original ones". It doesn't even put them on the same "continuum" -- one is stroke-based logograms that represent individual syllables of words, the other is pure artistic illustration. You seem to be trying to redefine the word "emoji" into something it's not, your own idiosyncratic personal definition. But that's not how words work.
  • sanxiyn 4y ago
    More important was writing in vernacular. Learning a writing system is comparatively easier than learning a new language. For a long time people needed to learn a new language to write.
  • avyeed_desa 4y ago
    I don't really believe that, as using chinese characters would lead to a much higher information density compared to using alphabet, which in turn would've tuned out to make books much lighter and being able to print more pages on one sheet, compared to two with the same informational value in western languages.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • EdwardDiego 4y ago
      Really? I once saw an old YouTube video that claimed that some hanzi are super obscure and even native Chinese have to look them up sometimes when wanting to use them, and gave the example of "sneeze". I asked my Shanghai born coworker, who led the local Chinese friendship society, about this, and he furrowed his brow and said "...shit, actually, yeah, I'd need to look that up myself." This is merely one anecdote, of course, There's information density, but there's also information accessibility. And the trick is finding the balance between the two. Having 8000 characters (in simplified Chinese) may be information dense, but how accessible is that information? E.g., a typical Chinese university graduate will know, on average, 3 -4K of them, and no doubt ones that are unused will atrophy over the years. The balance between density and accessibility is always ongoing. E.g., I find reading presentation slides with a transcript far more information dense than watching a video of that presentation, but some people find it far more accessible in video form. And then for complex discussions, I find video calls far more information dense than Slack message or email exchanges.
      • DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
        Recognizing and writing characters are different skills. Chinese people typically recognize far more characters than they can write (this has become much more severe in the electronics age, because most people input text using the pinyin Romanization, so they don't write by hand any more). In addition, if you're reading a text and you come across an uncommon character, you can often figure it out, both from context and by recognizing elements in the character (which give hints about the pronunciation and meaning).
  • antupis 4y ago
    There was also ideologial push to increase literacy from religious movements after reformation (Luther and Jesuit etc) which did not happen at China.
    • jhbadger 4y ago
      I think it was more the other direction. Protestantism was based on the idea that people should read the Bible themselves rather than have priests interpret it for them as had been traditionally done. This was impractical before printing because hand-copied books were so expensive. Cheap printed books led to the possibility of these movements being successful.
      • joshuacc 4y ago
        It goes both directions. Without the printing press, the rise of mass religious movements prioritizing literacy would not have been possible. But once the printing press was there, the religious movements pushed literacy forward faster than it would have gone without them.
    • thematrixturtle 4y ago
      The Communists came pretty close to dumping characters in favor of Latin script (pinyin). And this actually happened in Vietnam, although we have the French to thank/blame for that.
  • brazzy 4y ago
    In really though, literacy in Europe before the arrival of the printing press was lower than in China.
    • pixodaros 4y ago
      Another common fallacy in economic historians / "rise of the west" research is to compare the most developed parts of Europe (after 1700, typically the Low Countries and England) with 'all of China.' By doing this, they exclude the poorer parts of Europe and include the poorer parts of China to give the impression that "the great divergence" (sic) was early and foreordained
• political12345 4y ago
  • TulliusCicero 4y ago
    Was Germany doing a lot of colonialism in the fifteenth century?
    • morelisp 4y ago
      "Germany" was not really doing much of anything for most of the 15th century but the Hanseatic League was certainly a precursor to poor political theories about who "owned" the Baltic areas.
  • gpvos 4y ago
    Not this time.
  • m_mueller 4y ago
    colonialism might have happened the other way round (coming out of China) if just a few variables are changed. The article argues I think that Gutenberg’s innovation was one of those variables.
    • bpodgursky 4y ago
      This is pretty questionable. What few variables would have to change? It was an entirely different inward-facing system.
      • m_mueller 4y ago
        The way I think of China in comparison to Europe is basically, what if the Roman Empire survived until modernity - i.e. a central government for territories the size and importance of Europe and North Africa combined. This kind of centralistic system would probably also have continued Antique knowledge on a similar trajectory, but then stagnated, since fragmented societies with enough wealth to spread around simply create more opportunities to revolutionize various scientific fields. So yeah, I think you can see it as something not up to a few variables, but you could also, as an example, pinpoint it to the Mongolian invasion creating the Yuan dinasty, which basically adopted Chinese culture and continued the empire, rather than fragmenting it like what the Germanic invasions did to Rome. This might have come down to a couple of decisions by Kublai Khan.
• mikewarot 4y ago
  Watt had a model steam engine, with a glass cylinder, but couldn't scale it up in iron or steel. When he tried, there was a gap of up to an inch between the piston and cylinder, he had no way of filling the gap. It was when Wilkinson came along and used his new boring machine to make a precision cylinder that Watt was able to complete his engine. There are a lot of things that had to precede Watt's success. In the same way, there are a lot of details that tend to get ignored in the Gutenberg as Great Man narrative. They did get enumerated, and it's important to keep those details in mind as they were the decisive factor, and Gutenberg was just the hacker who managed to successfully combine them in an effective manner.
  • NamTaf 4y ago
    If you’ve not watched it, go find James Burke’s “Connections”. It takes this idea writ large; technology is almost always standing on the backs of giants before you and changing one thing which pushes the ball a bit further forward.
    • oifjsidjf 4y ago
      Stable diffusion is a great example. First Nicola Tesla for electricity, then transistors, then programmable microchips, then operating systems, then video games and because of them GPUs came into existance, them machine learning, then GPUs because more programmable because games required more and more freedom in shaders, then eventually deep learning, and now stable diffusion. "The right man at the right time makes all the difference."
  • WalterBright 4y ago
    > just a hacker He did it, while others did not. So Gutenberg gets the credit.
  • ithkuil 4y ago
    "We stand on the shoulders of all sorts of people of different heights"
  • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
• marsven_422 4y ago
  [dead]
• fsckboy 4y ago
  We like to think of Johannes Gutenberg as inventor of the printing press and movable type in 1450. Yet, the first movable type got invented in China around 1040 by Bi Sheng. The types were made from porcelain material. Later wooden movable types were developed... on wikipedia if you look up "movable type" you see a big discussion of the earlier work in China and Korea before moving on to Gutenberg. if you look up "printing press" you get the Gutenberg story only, including that Gutenberg discovered an alloy for his type that was so good it remained unchanged for hundreds of years. conflating movable type with printing press is a big mistake for this type of analysis, and that's before getting to the out of the box simplicity of movable type for alphabets a few dozen characters long vs the vocabulary required for Chinese writing. (I happened to look this up the other day just to get the date that mass printing started in Europe, and I started with movable type so I had already recently discovered all the above points)
  • quietbritishjim 4y ago
    Silly but genuine question: how to you use movable type without a printing press? I mean, once you've arranged all your type onto a plate representing a page, what are you going to do with it except slap some ink on it and put paper against it? Is the difference that the Chinese just lay the paper manually over it rather than use a machine (the press) to do it?
    • masklinn 4y ago
      Probably. Much like woodblock printing, which can be done with or without press. Also a printing press would not lay the paper, it was "just" used to press said paper onto the type (which had been inked by hand). You'd lay the type, then ink the type, lay paper on top (usually using a frame to ensure it's correctly positioned), move the assembly under the press then press it down. Release the press, open the assembly, get the printed sheet out, repeat (minus laying the type). That Gutenberg also invented movable metal type in europe, as well as a production process for reproducible quality metal type, are probably bigger factors than the press itself (though the separation of labor and mechanical efficiency of the press should not be discounted). But since he basically released the entire thing as a "movable-type printing system", the printing press is often used as a stand-in for the entire production process.
• ssnistfajen 4y ago
  Glaring paywall in the article obscuring the actual statement/conclusion aside, I recommend reading "The Chinese Typewriter : A History" by Thomas S. Mullaney (ISBN 9780262536103). The book covers a lot about Chinese language(s) adaptation to an Information Age crisis brought by technologies based on primarily Western/Latin alphabets, and how some of these adaptations paved the way for Chinese language's integration into the information technology world of today. I recommend approaching these topics without predetermined judgement on whether a language is inherently superior or inferior. Such biases are the last things we need in today's world full of division and tribalism.
  • navigate8310 4y ago
    I didn't even realize the article was behind a paywall. Have you tried considering the use of extensions that bypass such artificial restrictions, especially scientific journals?
    • UncleMeat 4y ago
      The linked article is the ad for the actual article, which requires you to be a paid subscriber to this person's substack. If you read the linked article only, you also didn't bypass the paywall.
      • socialdemocrat 4y ago
        Substack had 7 day free trial which can be canceled at any time
  • UncleMeat 4y ago
    Yep this is the winning strategy. Actual historians rather than random software engineers dabbling in history writing essays with minimal citation. I find it baffling how little the software community seems to care for the expertise of historians. There are so many books written by professionals who have spent thousands and thousands of hours on these topics that are available for access.
  • socialdemocrat 4y ago
• PicassoCTs 4y ago
  The reason europe succeeded, was mostly internal competition. A million thiefdoms, preying up one another (mostly in germany, italy and the balcans) with some economic save heavens (great britain, the netherlands) this was basically a free market of rulers. If a ruler did not cut it, the micro-nation would fall behind and be gobbled up. If a ruler was against a invention, you would pack up, move into the town behind the next hill were some upstart youngster would welcome the new things - because he had a expansion planned. So fierce competition and wars destroy entrenched interests and landlords of stagnating stability (church, guilds, etc.). To push inventions, one need - in a civilized manner, recreate those conditions.
  • helloworld11 4y ago
    Bullshit. Truly, what nonsense. Europe spent centuries stagnating under the rules of multiple fiefdoms in constant attrition against each other for power, wealth, territory and so forth. Many other parts of the world did likewise for long stretches of time and in both cases, only moderate technical advancement that happened very, very slowly. It was only when certain very specific conditions of government stability, property protection, legal transparency and basic respect for individual and human rights helped certain states become prosperous. This was further helped by these states accumulating enough capital under conditions of prolonged internal peace to invest in aspects of wealth-facilitating public infrastructure. What you claim is the diametric opposite of basic reality. Asia during much of the middle ages at times fulfilled conditions of state stability, but it often did not coincide with certain other systemic requirements for widespread markets to develop. Instead, the stability was of an autocratic and arbitrary type that facilitated stagnant top-down paternalism.
    • socialdemocrat 4y ago
      There was stagnation after the fall of the Roman Empire while new states and systems were trying to establish itself. However the later medieval period was full of innovation. It was far more active in using machinery than Roman Empire and China: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-european-mill-revolution https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-european-mill-revolu... Medieval Europe significantly advanced glass making, invented spectacles and lenses, laying the groundwork for telescopes and microscopes: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/glass-the-substance-of-science https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/glass-the-substance-of-s... Medieval Europe pioneered mechanical clocks which was a pretty big deal: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-missing-chinese-mechanical-clocks https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-missing-chinese-mech... Medieval Europe also advanced gunpowder weapons more rapidly than in China, and already had evolved technology around plate armor and crossbows far beyond anything the Romans did: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-did-europe-and-not-china-dominate https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-did-europe-and-not-c... The idea that no innovation happened in medieval Europe is severely overstated. I think it stems from the fact that medieval Europe had less production of literature, science and arts than Rome and Greece. Yet in terms of practical inventions, medieval Europe, did a lot more.
• notRobot 4y ago
  > Books got 60 times cheaper in 50 years I'm always confused by this wording. Does this mean that the new price was 1/60th the original?
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    Yes. If vanilla ice cream is twice as cheap as chocolate ice cream, that means you can buy two vanilla for one chocolate. Vanilla is half the price. Extrapolating, 60 times cheaper means 1/60th -- you could buy 60 books for the same price 1 book cost 50 years ago.
  • euroderf 4y ago
    Good catch. A pet peeve of mine. Using "times" for a decrease in size is not too bright. I attribute it to laziness, because (apparently) nobody wants to actually form the word "sixtieth", not even mentally.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • xena 4y ago
    It means that the process to make books was made 60 times less expensive, which allowed more people to afford making books.
    • idiotsBeDamned 4y ago
      Yes, we understood that, we're wondering about the numerical interpretation of "60x cheaper"
      • Maken 4y ago
        I don't really see how it could be interpreted as anything as "the cost was 1/60 of the original".
        • 4y ago
• simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  One thing that doesn't get mentioned often is that the West had a "simpler" alphabet of 26 characters, 10 numbers, and a few punctuation marks (~20). Ok, add uppercase, and you're still at about 80 individual, distinct characters. Chinese or Korean, on the other hand, needed many more characters. Creating the movable types for them was not an easy feat. Certainly more difficult than with the German equivalent. In particular for Korea: Hangul [0], which is a "simpler" language that gradually took over Hanja [1] in Korea, was "created" only in the 15th century, not before. Earlier than that, even if Korea has the equivalent of "printing", the complexity of it was higher than the one experienced with the west alphabet. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja
  • masklinn 4y ago
    > In particular for Korea: Hangul [0], which is a "simpler" language It's not a language, it's an alphabet. And I fail to see the need for quotes, there's really no denying hangul is simpler than hanja. However the syllabic structure of hangul would still make it a lot more challenging printing than the linear structure of the latin alphabetic script: you'd need either a type piece per syllable (of which there are >10000), or you'd need a variant for each possible block layout. There are 9 possible layouts, though there are limitations which cuts down on the complexity of that option. But still, assuming you want fixed-size blocks and depending on your decisions on complex finals you'd need 6-9 variants of each initial, and 2-3 version of each final. If you're fine with variable-size blocks (and spacers to line things up) then you can probably cut down to 3 or even 2 of each initials, but it's not going to look great.
    • rvba 4y ago
      Is there some way to learn hangul to be able to write it? I dont ask about learning actual Korean. Just Hangul yo say "write English in Hangul" - if it is possible. Or some service that "translitetates" your name to Hangul?
      • 4y ago
• nathias 4y ago
  it probably didn't hurt that the whole culture was centered around a book
  • hasmanean 4y ago
    And that there was constant demand for said book. And there was no copyright on the text.
• apienx 4y ago
  Flawed premise IMHO. Printing is a tool which evolved to keep pace with the sophistication of the societies using/developing it. The Southern Song dynasty came close to an industrial age, but was held back by a belief system (confucianism) that privileges cushy stability over ruthless progress. This, in part, prevented the emergence of a product-and-service-hungry bourgeoisie. The level of technological progress of a society is mostly determined by its culture.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • socialdemocrat 4y ago
    The Song dynasty was not anywhere near an industrial age. China never went through a machine revolution with great proliferation of the usage of machines as in things like windmills, water wheels, clocks, trip hammers, screw presses etc: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-missing-chinese-machine-revolution https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-missing-chinese-mach... China had machines, but they were used at a much smaller scale and had no way to expand in usage thanks to unsuitable geography and climate in China.
• offByJuan 4y ago
  Let’s not forget Aldus Manutius. His orders of magnitude cheaper books than Gutenberg made books available to regular people. He can be seen as inventor of paperback books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldus_Manutius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldus_Manutius
• paulluuk 4y ago
  I'm surprised this doesn't mention Mongolians or Kublai Khan anywhere, as they ruled China at the time and were the ones who introduced Asian printing techniques to Europeans in the first place, and allowed Gutenberg to make his first printing press.
• mywacaday 4y ago
  There was an article publisher here a while back discussing that Chinese progress was limited due to not having invented glass so scholars ability to remain productive after their 40s was diminished due to the lack of reading glasses, perhaps this was a factor as well.
• morpheos137 4y ago
  As others have said it seems obvious dealing with about two dozen characters well adapted for engraving is easier than dealing with several thousand (at least) more complicated characters.
• c7b 4y ago
  Calling Gutenberg a James Watt to Chinese printing press designs is... questionable. Afaik he was not aware of Chinese/Korean designs that he could have improved upon. Also, the Chinese designs arguably weren't presses, since they rubbed paper against a type - the screw was one of the many important innovations by Gutenberg. The article would benefit from focusing less on the "race" between Europe and China (which arguably wasn't one, but two largely separate developments) and more on the technology.
  • socialdemocrat 4y ago
    It was because, Gutenberg did not invent movable type. That was already in use in Europe. A high chance that technology came from Asia. Hence Gutenberg took an exiting technology and improved it. Gutenberg did not invent the screw press. Almost identical presses were already used in paper making. This was about combining a variety of technologies into one better system.
  • terrorOf 4y ago
• kalimanzaro 4y ago
  Overlooked in the article: the Yuan/Song invention of movable types made of tin, which melts at low temperatures similar to that of Gutenberg's type metals. But they didnt catch on due to the poor ink adsorption. Source: https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=d__HBAAAQBAJ&hl=zh-CN&pg=PA218&img=1&zoom=3&sig=ACfU3U0R0DmpMVsBSl4UMXSi2NGoEOzYdw&w=1280 https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=d__HBAAA...
  • socialdemocrat 4y ago
    I knew about that but didn't think to include it has it wasn't widely used and lacked many important components. Not just the ink. A key advantage of Gutenberg's alloy was that it neither shrunk not expanded. That is what gave quick accurate duplication of types. Wood cuts and bronze types were worth mentioning as they were widely used in China and Korea.
    • kalimanzaro 4y ago
      Indeed, you are right, most innovations are more about timing and adoption rather than invention. I think though that the point about shrinkage is the large change between casting and room temperatures (and maybe during pressing?); the differences in thermal coefficients (per degree) are significant but not that huge. As for oil based inks-- that too was widely used in China-- for seals. In fact sealpressing and pressprinting is the same process, wouldnt you say? Have not found anything indicating the Chinese made that leap (en masse, of course). Finally .. antimony is kind of the unsung hero here. Its the magic element that the Chinese didnt know about.
• kurupt213 4y ago
  Paper had been around in the Mediterranean since the late Bronze Age thanks to the Egyptians
  • socialdemocrat 4y ago
    Not really usable in Europe due to the climate. Chinese style paper really made a big difference.
  • pseingatl 4y ago
    Papyrus is not paper. It's a completely different technology.
• Werewolf255 4y ago
  The article isn't bad, but why is the title so needlessly antagonistic?
• sposeray 4y ago
  [dead]
• socialdemocrat 4y ago
  Author here, sorry about the paywall, I am trying to experiment with different ways of growing my readership and subscribers. You can get past the paywall by signing up for a 7-day free trial. It can be canceled at any time. If this really rubs you the way then I am making this draft link of the whole article available for a limited time: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/bc1449ba-7e0d-43b6-8d53-8fe4aa21e8a7 https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/bc1449ba-7e0d-43b6-8d53-... Some of the questions popping up here regarding significance of different components of the Gutenberg invention is addressed in a linked article: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-was-the-printing-press-not-invented https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-was-the-printing-pre... This discusses technologies existing in Europe at the time but not in China, which Gutenberg could leverage to create his printing system. To clarify the point here isn't to suggest a civilization or society is superior to another. It is a discussion about printing systems, not people or languages.
• gunapologist99 4y ago
  It's a strange article. The author conflates 'printing press' and 'movable type' in the second paragraph, but then admits that the printing press in Asia wasn't a machine at all and was entirely manual. The innovation was not in producing the type plate, but in automating the production of printed pages.
  • socialdemocrat 4y ago
    Author here, they are conflated for good reason. The printing press is really an advancement of the movable type system developed in Asia. What Gutenberg did wasn't really about the screw press as I elaborate on here: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-was-the-printing-press-not-invented https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-was-the-printing-pre... The screw press already existed in Europe and was widely used. Reducing Gutenbergs invention to just being about using a screw press does not do justice to what he did. It was really about combining several techniques to advance printing. Better alloys for types. Better system for duplicating types. Better ink. A lot of the advancement could have been made even without the printing press itself. And the printing press without these advancement would have made very little improvement.
    • gunapologist99 4y ago
      Excellent clarification, thank you!
• pixodaros 4y ago
  Was it? As late as the 18th century, European visitors to China kept remarking on how cheap books were there and how many people had them. Movable type was suitable for the Greek and Latin alphabets, but not for Chinese characters or Arabic flowing script. The Chinese had great success with woodblock printing.
• ineedasername 4y ago
  TLDR: China beat Gutenberg to movable type but Gutenberg beat everyone else to a printing press.
• Bimos 4y ago
  Chinese usually gives the same information with shorter text. Those who play TAS [1] usually switch language to Chinese so that the dialogs could be skipped with the shortest time. And ancient written Chinese 文言文 is even shorter. So I may argue that we don't have that much to print. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool-assisted_speedrun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool-assisted_speedrun