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Gutenberg's 42-line Bible required about 299 glyphs. The natural presumption is his letters were cast from a single matrix (e.g. a single 'A' mold casts thousa

Gutenberg's 42-line Bible required about 299 glyphs. The natural presumption is his letters were cast from a single matrix (e.g. a single 'A' mold casts thousands of 'A' types), however careful analysis of his books reveals variations between letters which suggest multiple subtly different matrices were used. The reason for the apparent variation between the matrices is disputed, but one explanation is the variation between matrices may indicate the matrices were produced by composing several individual stroke punches, rather than one punch per gylph. I think this technique of using individual stroke punches to compose matrices then used for die casting could work for Eastern languages too. I don't know how many individual stroke punches you would need for Korean or Chinese, but it's surely fewer than the number of glyphs those languages have.

rob74 4y ago
That's very interesting actually! Today it's tempting to think that you only need 26*2 glyphs for the entire alphabet (although with ligatures that's not quite true either), but back then they probably still felt the need to more faithfully emulate hand-written books? That would explain that there are several variations for the same letter?
- masklinn 4y ago
  Nah it’s probably that they had multiple matrices to cast more types faster. You only need 62 glyphs for a basic Latin alphabet including case (although gutenberg’s german would require a few more), but you need a lot of copies of each to lay a complete page, and they’d lay multiple pages per sheet. Not to mention because character frequencies are not equal you need a lot more of some than others so you might have a multi-type matrix of just Es in order to cast enough of those for your needs in a reasonable time frame.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > You only need 62 glyphs for a basic Latin alphabet (although gutenberg’s german would require a few more), Gutenberg's bible used ligatures and various symbols too, that ups the count a lot. I haven't counted them myself, but wikipedia says 290 characters and cites John Man's book about Gutenberg. A paper I found about using ML to do cluster analysis on the glyphs says 299 unique glyphs and cites Gottfried Zedler. I can't read either of those sources, but a bit less than 300 seems like a safe bet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#Type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#Type https://deepai.org/publication/classifying-the-typefaces-of-the-gutenberg-42-line-bible https://deepai.org/publication/classifying-the-typefaces-of-...

rob74 4y ago

That's very interesting actually! Today it's tempting to think that you only need 26*2 glyphs for the entire alphabet (although with ligatures that's not quite true either), but back then they probably still felt the need to more faithfully emulate hand-written books? That would explain that there are several variations for the same letter?

masklinn 4y ago
Nah it’s probably that they had multiple matrices to cast more types faster. You only need 62 glyphs for a basic Latin alphabet including case (although gutenberg’s german would require a few more), but you need a lot of copies of each to lay a complete page, and they’d lay multiple pages per sheet. Not to mention because character frequencies are not equal you need a lot more of some than others so you might have a multi-type matrix of just Es in order to cast enough of those for your needs in a reasonable time frame.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > You only need 62 glyphs for a basic Latin alphabet (although gutenberg’s german would require a few more), Gutenberg's bible used ligatures and various symbols too, that ups the count a lot. I haven't counted them myself, but wikipedia says 290 characters and cites John Man's book about Gutenberg. A paper I found about using ML to do cluster analysis on the glyphs says 299 unique glyphs and cites Gottfried Zedler. I can't read either of those sources, but a bit less than 300 seems like a safe bet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#Type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#Type https://deepai.org/publication/classifying-the-typefaces-of-the-gutenberg-42-line-bible https://deepai.org/publication/classifying-the-typefaces-of-...