Warning. This is off-topic, so everyone not interested (i.e. everyone
except Nicholas Bodley) should delete now.

Nicholas Bodley skribis:

>
> Peter T. Daniels skribis:
> >
> > The common term is "lead type." It's not "lead-alloy type."
>
> I've set a very modest amount of type by hand, in a composing stick; just
> a few lines. I know of the alloy as "type metal".

The term used in the industry is "type metal." I have several machines
for casting type including a Linotype and a Ludlow.

> Justification is a nuisance, and the spacebands in Linotype were a
> brilliant solution: Simple pairs of wedges. I never learned why the molten
> type metal doesn't leak.

Because there are no empty spaces between the wedges. Each
wedge is exactly vertical on the side next to the matrices. They are
diagonal next to each other.

There was an early competing machine called the Rogers Typograph.
It used matrices strung on long wires rather than circulating matrices
as on the Linotype. It also used a pair of circular wedges as spacebands.
When the Typograph machine was introduced, the Linotype company
took out ads in printing trade magazines claiming that their patents
covered any machine which produced single "slugs" of printing type
and that they would sue anyone who used the Typograph. This seriously
hampered sales of the Typograph, until Rogers noticed that his patent
application for the spaceband had been filed one week before that of
the Linotype machine, so he threatened to sue anyone who used
spacebands on a Linotype. The Linotype company tried to come up
with an alternative method of justification, but to no avail. Eventually
they bought the Rogers company, and made Rogers their head
engineer. (The International Printing Museum in Los Angeles, Calif.
[not CA] has a Rogers Typograph on display.)

> Automatic justification dates back to the Paige typesetter, a phenomenal
> machine, development supported by 'Mark Twain'. The Linotype's paired
> wedges (spacebands) were a delightfully-simple approach; Paige apparently
> had a much more sophisticated scheme.

The Paige machine set and justified pre-cast pieces of type as
an operator typed on a keyboard. A part of the mechanism also
distributed the type for reuse after printing. The machine was
incredibly complicated and prone to breaking down. It would have
cost three times as much to manufacture as the recently introduced
Linotype. Mark Twain lost his fortune investing in this machine. Only
two were ever built. One of them is on display in the Mark Twain
house in Hartford, Conn. (not CT).

For a history of the Paige machine as well as a detailed description
of how it worked, see Legros and Grant, "Typographical Printing
Surfaces," London, 1916.

The Monotype machine casts individual pieces of type for each letter
and space. There is a separate machine with a keyboard which punches
a wide paper tape. Each character used in a font has a width which is
some multiple of 1/18 of the point size. As the operator types, the
machine keeps a mechanical tally of the total "units." When the operator
nears the end of the line, he looks at a dial which tells him how many
units each space in the line must be for a justified line. He then presses
one of fifteen special keys which punch that number into the paper tape.
The casting machine reads the tape in backwards, so it knows before
each line how many units to use for the width of spaces.

> > I have (having created some of them) all the fonts used in WWS. I don't
> > know that having Unicode makes the exotics any easier to use -- I just
> > select the font I need from the Fonts menu. I then either select Lloyd
> > Anderson's specific keyboard, or I go to PopChar to select characters by
> > shape. (His Syllabaries keyboard is a work of genius.)
>
> Imho, an interesting insight into how you work. However, considering that
> you send e-mail to a publicly-accessible mailing list, as recent
> experience has shown, you can no longer completely work with total success
> in that environment.

If all you're interested in is producing hard copy, then that method
works just fine.

> As well, my apologies to all who don't give a hoot about technological
> philosophy.

My apologies as well.

--Ph. D.