You won't see it in Monotype since the casting and keyboarding
are done on different machines. But Linotype made swash
characters and "typographic refinement characters" (mostly
two letters on one matrix to give the appearance of kerning)
which were inserted in the correct place in the line by hand by
the operator. They had no teeth cut, so the machine returned
them to a common tray near the operator for reuse.

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@...>
To: qalam@yahoogroups.com <qalam@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Sunday, October 07, 2001 12:30 PM
Subject: Re: Variable (or variegated) tongue

>Well, sure, calligraphers do it all the time. If you want to see it in
>type, look at the styles Adobe sometimes calls "Extras" -- or the
>"Swash" varieties of italics, and so on.
>
>You won't see it much in metal type because each little variant has to
>be cut individually (in all the sizes), and you won't see it in Linotype
>or Monotype because there's a limited number of slots in each batch of
>matrices (just like electronic fonts are generally limited to 255
>characters).