Well you’re right about that. I did mean an issue as far as specifying the printing orientation. The printers didn’t orient, they just printed whatever was on the plate.
Yes, why I initially said the concept predated printing of any kind. It is a means of expressing orientation of a rectangle, and stays that way through it’s usage in painting, printing, and photography. The subtle distinction is it’s use for computer printers, where it’s actually a composition instruction.
And just in writing this I realize this term must have been used prior to computer printing as composition and layout instructions. Given any block of text or images that could be oriented either way on a rectangular sheet of paper there had to be a way to specifiy that difference. I have no doubt using ‘portrait’ and ‘landscape’ goes far back in time, probably using different terms in other languages.
I don’t disagree that the original concepts of landscape and portrait came from painting/photography. I think the question being addressed here is did “landscape” and “portrait” as printer orientation terms come from the field of non-digital printing or were they borrowed from some other device orientation nomenclature like monitors which did use the terms landscape and portrait to describe their orientation.
Is there any evidence of the terms “landscape” and “portrait” ever being used in any article, manual etc. involving non-digital printing devices in the years before the advent of the laser printer?
Not that I ever heard of. Perhaps the large industrial models, but that seems unlikely. These were simple mechanical machines with a drum that had to follow the scan direction.
I checked some Linotype manuals and the indexes did not contain the terms ‘landscape’ or ‘portrait’.
It wasn’t that the image rotated, it was, just as today, that it would take the paper from the appropriately oriented tray, based on your selection, A4 or A4R for example. My point is that variation in orientation was available, though maybe that’s a relatively recent option.
I never heard the terms used thusly until digital photography. My first guess as to their meaning was “near” and “far”. I still don’t like the terms, but have to use them.
The fact is, vertical is always vertical and horizontal is always horizontal. Why mess with this terminology. A portrait could be vertical, horizontal, oval, square, etc. as could a landscape. I realize that most portraits are thought to be more vertical and landscape is interpreted as horizontal. There is no interpretation for vertical and horizontal, period. There is too much curt terminology in the digital world that is not necessary. This is the one that drives me crazy.
Horizontal and vertical are reference lines. Portrait and landscape refer to an orientation of a rectangle traditionally. The rectangle will always have two horizontal and two vertical sides, but the orientation of the whole rectangle can still change and remain orthagonal. The difference made by digital devices is that and image can be rotated to either of the two orientations. Also note that that a digital device can rotate a square image on square paper to either orientation.
You are correct in your explanation. However in the 40+ years I have been in the advertising and interior photography business (until digital photography) no one that I worked with including other photographers, art directors, artists, etc. referred to image orientation in terms or portrait and landscape. They only used vertical and horizontal.
I’d love to support you on this, because most jargon should never leak outside to non-professionals. It just creates confusion and fosters bad thinking. My current pet peeve is the use of dark in dark matter and dark energy. You can kinda sorta defend dark matter because whatever it is doesn’t seem to give off any visible light, but dark energy is a completely different meaning of dark, something more like unknown, which is also often what the dark in dark matter means. Physics is full of confusing and cutesy terms. Charm. Wino. Jerk and jounce.
But landscape and portrait aren’t like this. If you look back at their actual usage you see that the terms come from photography via 19th century painting. A painting or a photograph of an actual landscape was approached differently from a painting or photograph of an actual person’s portrait. Specialized lenses were developed that made it easier to frame these views and those lenses apparently started getting named landscape and portrait lenses. It’s not an absolutely clear progression but I find it convincing.
It’s convincing because it’s an example of an extremely common figure of speech called synecdoche. Whenever a usage derivation gets argued, the first thing that should be looked at is whether the proposed derivation matches the way we know that English normally works. Most proposed acronyms fail this test, e.g., because the use of acronyms was very uncommon before the 20th century and I think that every one that can be accounted for is known to scholars. You can immediately dismiss back formations like stating posh is derived from port outward, starboard home.
Portrait and landscape are obvious synecdoche for horizontal and vertical. Their use for orientation is immediately obvious. It’s hard to imagine why photography, printing, and monitors wouldn’t use such a clear representation of the image that will be formed. A two-dimensional image is clearer and more evocative than the single dimension of horizontal and vertical.
To me, this is an example of the best technical jargon. Jargon, like every other class of words, has some uses that will rise and fade with the times. Bringing these terms back is also a common process. I happen to like these so I’ll disagree with your vent. I’m sure we’d find another term to agree on.
While I appreciate your point regarding the origins of terminology and technical jargon, that does not address the key issue: clarity. While those familiar with the evolution of these terms and the industry jargon might make the translation automatically in their minds from landscape to horizontal and portrait to vertical, the lay person, not thinking in terms of the digital world, could interpret landscape or portrait in more than one way, thus making it a less efficient and clear form of communicating an idea. The entire idea behind jargon is to communicate an idea (generally a complex one) clearly and concisely, thus why the terms horizontal and vertical, for which there are no alternative interpretations, are more logical choices for jargon.
Jargon does change and it should to convey terms with increasing levels of clarity. Portrait and landscape simply do not fulfill that requirement. Clarity is found through terms that have the least possible opportunities for alternate interpretation.
I realize we may not come to see eye to eye on this point, however, as you say I’m sure we will find another term to agree on.
Better would be “short side up” and “long side up”. (If a picture is oriented the way its creator intended, then naturally it’s “right side up”, regardless of where the long and short sides are.)