Most interesting; thanks. I'm re-quoting just a couple of short bits...

On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 23:40:45 -0400, suzmccarth <suzmccarth@...>
wrote and quoted.

> http://www.itk.ca/communications/technology-syllabics.php
>
> Syllabics and Technology
>
> reproducing syllabics until the 1950's where stencil photo-etching

(Please follow up on [vellum], re s. p. e.: Was this Gestetner? Any other
"known name" associated with it?)

> But early personal computers were not well adapted to typography and it
> wasn't until the Apple Macintosh in 1984 and its ability to graphically
> display typefaces, ...

@Extremely@ helpful reminder. I think it's safe to say that modern
computer typography creates text as if it were a specially-organized and
presented collection of frequently-reused graphic images. While a few
impact printers could accept arbitrary glyph bitmaps from the computer*,
most were constrained by unalterable, essentially unscalable bitmaps.

*I have such a printer; has Latin-1 as one of two resident encodings, and
was designed around 1985: Seikosha MP-1300AI, nine pin.

> With the laser printer and the PostScript language introduced in 1987,
> the revolution in "desktop publishing" was born.

Glory, is that ever true. Been meaning to get my feet wet in Postscript
for a couple of decades. I know of a quite-well-done cartoon defined by
Postscript.

> In brief, syllabic type design did not have the luxury of time to
> evolve, as had Roman orthography.

"Omigosh", again. Many thanks, Suzanne!

ESOL: Omigosh -- not a Native American (better term welcome) word; means
"Oh, my gosh!".
--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass. (Not "MA")
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
Hope for these times: Paul Rogat Loeb's book --
"The Impossible Will Take a Little While:..."
ESOL: English for Speakers of Other Languages