4 ms·
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
by 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 agoNah 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-...