I worked on an early digital font system. The kerning tables were calculated in units as low as 1% of the character widths. We ended up throwing out most of the values because they were too small to represent at the available resolution, and rounded all the rest until we had small table that represented all the combinations that could be kerned by at least 1 pixel on the display.
But we knew someone had put that original data together the hard way. And we felt really sorry for you.
I have a theory that the period was to tell people to stop reading. Reading was by no means a universal skill back in the day. People may well have needed help to know when to stop looking for intelligible characters, and not just keep trying to read windows, stray dogs, water pumps or footprints in the dirt.
I was told—no source, alas—that the full stop was a way of adding emphasis: a bit like underlining. I believe the Wall Street Journal still has a full stop at the end of its front-page flag.
And as long as we’re telling typesetting stories, I knew I’d been setting and proofreading type too long the day I tried to dial the hyphen in a phone number.
Didn’t mean to cause a firestorm of controversy over this one, much less the use of “always”. I just find it interesting that signs, storefronts, and newspaper headlines printed during that time used a period at the end of what was not a grammatical sentence. It’s an interesting artifact of the time, and I wondered why the period was used and why it was discontinued in modern times.
[total hijack]
When I saw that, it reminded me of the first time I saw this company’s logo. My first thought was that the reason they did it that way was so when one of their trucks or planes crashed, even if it landed upside down, the logo was still readable.
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