6 ms·

The latent font designer in me balks at the thought of taking a typeface and intentionally making one character look more like another character. Was it some t

The latent font designer in me balks at the thought of taking a typeface and intentionally making one character look more like another character. Was it some technical constraint of the typewriter that caused “1” to become more like “l” come XX century?

bediger4000 1y ago
My parents had a typewriter without a 1 or a 0. I always thought it was to provide room for two other valuable characters like the old "cents" c with a bar through it.
thedufer 1y ago
Typewriter keys cost money, and dropping the 1 allowed them to drop a key without significantly affecting the use of it. As far as I can tell, that's effectively the entire rationale. This wasn't meaningfully the case prior; the printing press would've just needed more copies of 'l' if they'd dropped the 1s, and letters weren't as significant a portion of the cost of the machine, anyway. And afterwards came computers, which need to distinguish between the characters even if they're displayed the same way.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  > Typewriter keys cost money They didn't just cost money. They were competing to the limited space around the typing area, what meant they were constrained at the border of a circumference that would be entirely filled with mechanisms. In other words, the cost in both money, size, and weight depended on the square of the number of keys.
- lostlogin 1y ago
  With limited space and resources, I wonder what other letter or number could be dropped and meaning retained. 0 and O might be worth considering?
hidingfearful 1y ago
was it that in prior years a reader could usually distinguish 1 from l by context. Even today, very few things cause me to need to te11 a 1 from a l. (typo 0n purpose) it matters when reading code and random string (what we now call passwords, though back then passwords were things you could pronounce, unlike say ywtr466Nh%vX). It doesn't matter for much else. Though it did make an interesting plot twist in the Mioscene Arrow
adrianmonk 1y ago
> Was it some technical constraint of the typewriter that caused “1” to become more like “l” come XX century? The typewriter I grew up with simply didn't have a key for it. It also didn't have a 0 or an exclamation mark or a plus sign. There were well known substitutes: For the number 1, type lowercase letter l. For the number 0, type uppercase letter o. For the exclamation mark, type a period, hit backspace, and type an apostrophe / single quote. For the plus sign, I'm not aware of a good substitute. You could maybe superimpose a slash on a hyphen, but it would look bad. There was no division sign, and using a slash to denote division was not yet something I'd ever seen anyone do. You could probably have superimposed a hyphen and a colon to get ÷. Oddly enough, it did have other characters which you won't find on a standard US keyboard today: ¼, ½, and ¢. The cent sign was useful, and it seems logical to me that if you're going to have $ you should have ¢ too!
- pavlov 1y ago
  Cents were a useful unit back when a dollar was defined as 1/20th of an ounce of gold (or 1/35 between the Great Depression and 1970).
- ralferoo 1y ago
  In the UK, we also used to type '£' with an 'L' and backspacing and overtyping an '='. Weirdly, I learned to type on a second hand Selectric typewriter that my parents bought cheaply at some auction, and while it had a '1' key, the only ball we had used that key for punctuation instead, so we still needed to type 'l' instead.
  - JdeBP 1y ago
    And since I've mentioned GNU groff elsethread, here's where it today in its "ascii" mode uses a minus sign instead of the equals sign to do the very same thing as you did on your typewriter, for "Po", the macro for producing a pound symbol. * https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/tty-char.tmac?id=32393c7e30ed9b3787f458adf6b2e861b97b9088#n155 https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/t...
JdeBP 1y ago
The font designer in you is being influenced by computer displays and movable type. The world of typewriting had some idiosyncrasies, not even shared with (say) the world of dot-matrix printing, one of which was pressure to make the largest composable range of characters with the smallest number of physical keys. Which means common base shapes. It's a little known fact that some parts of the computing world are faithfully reproducing this aspect of typewriters, trying to write bullet points, daggers, and currency symbols not with actual Unicode but with a very limited ASCII repertoire and overstriking, even today. There's a table of this stuff, relying upon the glyphs being visually close enough that they make other glyphs, in GNU groff right now. Here, for example, is how it currently, in its UTF-8-disabled mode (as unfortunately still used by manual page readers on several operating systems), composes a down arrow in the typewriter style of overstriking a vertical bar with a 'v' letter: https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/tty-char.tmac?id=32393c7e30ed9b3787f458adf6b2e861b97b9088#n29 https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/t...
- strogonoff 1y ago
  Thank you for this bit of trivia, it is way more interesting than it technically should be!
- kragen 1y ago
  Markdown writes bullet points and underlines without even overstriking.
  - JdeBP 1y ago
    No. It has things that aren't bullet points, and besidelines. Underlines go underneath, and asterisks are not bullet points. In its UTF-8 mode, for bullet points GNU groff uses the actual Unicode characters that are available. Until 2024, in "ascii" mode it overstruck a plus symbol with a letter 'o', one of many such typewriting tricks, which no-one but those printing manual pages to old printers capable of the same typewriting trick would have ever seen as it was supposed to be seen. On VDUs, such bullet points just came out as the letter 'o'. Sadly, in 2024 its developers did away with this interesting little-known quirky feature that almost no-one would have seen properly rendered. (-: * https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?56015 https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?56015 Interestingly, I couldn't find a Unicode code point that satisfactorily represented the crossed circle that this would have been on paper. There's a mathematical operator that is not semantically correct. I wonder whether, given the reams of books on Linux-based operating system administration and use, any author or publisher typesetting yet another copy of the manual pages got grotty's overstruck plus-o into print. Because that would be one rather ironic argument for getting it an assigned Unicode code point. I suspect that all the books were better typeset than that, though.
devnullbrain 1y ago
The technical constraint still applies. My keyboard uses ' ' and '-' to represent many different symbols.

bediger4000 1y ago

My parents had a typewriter without a 1 or a 0. I always thought it was to provide room for two other valuable characters like the old "cents" c with a bar through it.

thedufer 1y ago

Typewriter keys cost money, and dropping the 1 allowed them to drop a key without significantly affecting the use of it. As far as I can tell, that's effectively the entire rationale. This wasn't meaningfully the case prior; the printing press would've just needed more copies of 'l' if they'd dropped the 1s, and letters weren't as significant a portion of the cost of the machine, anyway. And afterwards came computers, which need to distinguish between the characters even if they're displayed the same way.

marcosdumay 1y ago
> Typewriter keys cost money They didn't just cost money. They were competing to the limited space around the typing area, what meant they were constrained at the border of a circumference that would be entirely filled with mechanisms. In other words, the cost in both money, size, and weight depended on the square of the number of keys.
lostlogin 1y ago
With limited space and resources, I wonder what other letter or number could be dropped and meaning retained. 0 and O might be worth considering?

hidingfearful 1y ago

was it that in prior years a reader could usually distinguish 1 from l by context. Even today, very few things cause me to need to te11 a 1 from a l. (typo 0n purpose) it matters when reading code and random string (what we now call passwords, though back then passwords were things you could pronounce, unlike say ywtr466Nh%vX). It doesn't matter for much else. Though it did make an interesting plot twist in the Mioscene Arrow

adrianmonk 1y ago

> Was it some technical constraint of the typewriter that caused “1” to become more like “l” come XX century? The typewriter I grew up with simply didn't have a key for it. It also didn't have a 0 or an exclamation mark or a plus sign. There were well known substitutes: For the number 1, type lowercase letter l. For the number 0, type uppercase letter o. For the exclamation mark, type a period, hit backspace, and type an apostrophe / single quote. For the plus sign, I'm not aware of a good substitute. You could maybe superimpose a slash on a hyphen, but it would look bad. There was no division sign, and using a slash to denote division was not yet something I'd ever seen anyone do. You could probably have superimposed a hyphen and a colon to get ÷. Oddly enough, it did have other characters which you won't find on a standard US keyboard today: ¼, ½, and ¢. The cent sign was useful, and it seems logical to me that if you're going to have $ you should have ¢ too!

pavlov 1y ago
Cents were a useful unit back when a dollar was defined as 1/20th of an ounce of gold (or 1/35 between the Great Depression and 1970).
ralferoo 1y ago
In the UK, we also used to type '£' with an 'L' and backspacing and overtyping an '='. Weirdly, I learned to type on a second hand Selectric typewriter that my parents bought cheaply at some auction, and while it had a '1' key, the only ball we had used that key for punctuation instead, so we still needed to type 'l' instead.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  And since I've mentioned GNU groff elsethread, here's where it today in its "ascii" mode uses a minus sign instead of the equals sign to do the very same thing as you did on your typewriter, for "Po", the macro for producing a pound symbol. * https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/tty-char.tmac?id=32393c7e30ed9b3787f458adf6b2e861b97b9088#n155 https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/t...

JdeBP 1y ago

The font designer in you is being influenced by computer displays and movable type. The world of typewriting had some idiosyncrasies, not even shared with (say) the world of dot-matrix printing, one of which was pressure to make the largest composable range of characters with the smallest number of physical keys. Which means common base shapes. It's a little known fact that some parts of the computing world are faithfully reproducing this aspect of typewriters, trying to write bullet points, daggers, and currency symbols not with actual Unicode but with a very limited ASCII repertoire and overstriking, even today. There's a table of this stuff, relying upon the glyphs being visually close enough that they make other glyphs, in GNU groff right now. Here, for example, is how it currently, in its UTF-8-disabled mode (as unfortunately still used by manual page readers on several operating systems), composes a down arrow in the typewriter style of overstriking a vertical bar with a 'v' letter: https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/tty-char.tmac?id=32393c7e30ed9b3787f458adf6b2e861b97b9088#n29 https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/t...

strogonoff 1y ago
Thank you for this bit of trivia, it is way more interesting than it technically should be!
kragen 1y ago
Markdown writes bullet points and underlines without even overstriking.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  No. It has things that aren't bullet points, and besidelines. Underlines go underneath, and asterisks are not bullet points. In its UTF-8 mode, for bullet points GNU groff uses the actual Unicode characters that are available. Until 2024, in "ascii" mode it overstruck a plus symbol with a letter 'o', one of many such typewriting tricks, which no-one but those printing manual pages to old printers capable of the same typewriting trick would have ever seen as it was supposed to be seen. On VDUs, such bullet points just came out as the letter 'o'. Sadly, in 2024 its developers did away with this interesting little-known quirky feature that almost no-one would have seen properly rendered. (-: * https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?56015 https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?56015 Interestingly, I couldn't find a Unicode code point that satisfactorily represented the crossed circle that this would have been on paper. There's a mathematical operator that is not semantically correct. I wonder whether, given the reams of books on Linux-based operating system administration and use, any author or publisher typesetting yet another copy of the manual pages got grotty's overstruck plus-o into print. Because that would be one rather ironic argument for getting it an assigned Unicode code point. I suspect that all the books were better typeset than that, though.

devnullbrain 1y ago

The technical constraint still applies. My keyboard uses ' ' and '-' to represent many different symbols.