Tamrin wrote:

> Well of course not, but this article on the demise of thorn:
>
> http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2002/11/12/31017/737
>
> highlights the importance of character inclusion in technology
> advances. I didn't realize the issue went back this far, I imagine
> the advent of the typewriter must have had a similar impact in places.
>
> Do people here know of other cases where advances in publishing
> technology influenced the loss, or gain, of characters?

This kinds of things always happened. Just a few examples:

- It is difficult to trace circles using a soft brush and liquid ink,
because the centrifugal force would "shoot" drops of ink all around the
circle. For this reason, when brush and china ink became the usual writing
tools in China, all the circles in the Chinese script became squares. Even
the character to write "sun", which used to be a circle with a round dot in
the middle, become a square with a horizontal line inside.

- The easiest shape obtained by depressing a squared stick into soft clay is
a "wedge" (in Latin "cuneus"). This caused the signs of the "cuneiform"
writing system to loose their original pictographic appearance, and to
become conventional combinations of wedge-shaped strokes.

- The Latin alphabet used to have lots of ligatures (two or more letters
graphically joined) and contextual shapes (variants only used in certain
position in a word). E.g., lowercase "i", "s" and "u" had two different
shapes each, depending on whether they were or not at the end of a word.
When movable type slipped in, most ligatures and all contextual shapes
progressively disappeared.

- In calligraphic Arabic, some letters go below the preceding letter, rather
than on its side. If many such "descending letter" follow each other in a
word, the height of the line of text containing that word must be increased
accordingly. But this characteristic is not easily reproduced in typography
so, in modern printed texts, all letters follow each other horizontally.

- Etc...

_ Marco