There’s nothing “fancy” about the style of architectural lettering I use, but I’ve found one extremely practical use for it: writing tiny. This is useful when filling out forms (or D&D character sheets). I can write very tiny, and it’s still perfectly legible.
I was thinking about the time it took writing in Palmer going back to cross the "t"s and dot the "i"s while looking for them in that long word.
Now I know what I learned in primary school was Palmer.
Your DoI representation gives “s” in two different styles. I’ve come across the long style before in older documents, but never two different styles in the same document. Can you explain this ?
And thanks, that was one very interesting post.
Take a closer look at the Declaration of Independence. Long ss (which look like uncrossed or partially crossed fs) are used at the word-initial and word-medial positions. Short ss (the regular one) are used in word-final positions. There are two different ligatures for ss, long-long and long-short (which is like a German ess-tset). That was the standard pattern.
A point of consideration:
Just a couple of years ago, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (the SAT), the test used by a majority of colleges and universities in the United States as a conisderation for admission, added an essay section.*
The essay is currently written in longhand. The GRE is now computer-based with an essay, but the resources simply aren’t there to automate the SAT, and aren’t likely to arrive anytime soon.
So what are these kids who are already not learning handwriting going to do when they apply to college?
*For those of you not addicted to education developments, the SAT has switched from two 800-point exams in Verbal and Quantitative skills to three 800-point sections. Analogies were dropped, and there is an 800-point added on. So the top combined score is now 2400, not 1600.
Some school districts in the '50’s dropped cursive writing, or as it was known then “penmanship.” When I took my two semesters of Russian we had a PhD mathematician who hadn’t had cursive in grade school. We learned to write cursive Cyrillic so he could write cursive in Cyrillic by not in English.