Typophile - Arcane Type Terminology - Comments

@eliason: Some of

James Arboghast — Sat, 5 Jan 2008 12:15:01 -0800

@eliason: Some of Wikipedia’s listed synonyms for the slash are new to me: “oblique, diagonal, whack, separatrix, virgule, scratch comma, slant, or forward slash.” Have any of you called it a whack, a separatrix, or a scratch comma before?

@aluminium: Well, isn’t that still typography? ...Perhaps there’s a need for articles to have a section on ’contemporary variations’ or the like.

I question whether what programmers do can be considered, or defined, as typography. Writing code is a form of typesetting in the sense that letters are set, but is it really typesetting or typography? I submit that it is not, because the goal of programming is not to set type in an aesthetically pleasing and coherent manner, but to write code to control the functions of a computer. Two different activites or professions are equated and conflated.

The definition of typography is being broadened to include things which are not typographic, but linguistic or semantic. Certain tasks in programming are being conflated with typography tasks.

So if the inclusionist philosophy wins in this absurd encyclopedestrianization of everything, and terms used by programmers must be included in typography articles because they are “contemporary vernacular”, the sensible thing to do is make it clear what came from where, distinguish between typography and “codesetting”. That would be a useful word for it. When composing you are typesetting, when writing code you are codesetting.

j a m e s

Aha, okay. Thanks for

Florian Hardwig — Sat, 5 Jan 2008 11:54:22 -0800

Aha, okay. Thanks for clarifying!
Btw, for those who think ‘Zwiebelfische’ are limited to the old metal days: Try inserting a ďīăċŗĩťıč that isn’t included in Georgia …

Zwiebelfisch [onion fish] is

eriks — Fri, 4 Jan 2008 23:23:34 -0800

Zwiebelfisch [onion fish] is a letter accidentally set in a different font (or a letter put in the wrong case)
No, a letter in the wrong case is just a Fisch (fish). A “verfischter Kasten” is a case full of wrong fonts. Sounds like a kosher sandwich, but was more often than not left to the apprentices (like me) to clean up. Which entailed setting all the type from the case into the composing stick to sort good from bad. And then “dissing” it back, as we called that in London.

German terms would be

Florian Hardwig — Fri, 4 Jan 2008 09:41:33 -0800

German terms would be great

Well, the most frequently quoted surely are ‘Hurenkind’ [child of a bitch] for ‘widow’ and ‘Schusterjunge’ [cobbler boy] for ‘orphan’ …

A voluminous printed matter free of errors – without having made a single correction – is a ‘Jungfrau(enwunder)’ [‘virgin (miracle)’ – yes, printers & typesetters are/were predominantly male], ‘Leading’ is called ‘Durchschuss’ [‘shot right through’?], a ‘Zwiebelfisch’ [onion fish] is a letter accidentally set in a different font (or a letter put in the wrong case), and an upside-down metal letter (so that the cone’s bottom leaves its print) is a ‘Fliegenkopf’ [fly’s head].

There are a lot more; and yes, I’d like to learn about some more from Erik’s experienced vocabulary, too – especially if they aren’t included in this Wikipedia list.

This map, the ‘Typographiae Imperii Accurata Tabula’, is packed with type and printing terms, a lot of them ‘arcane’, most of them in German.
Made by Linotype in 1967, found on Robert Michael’s Flickr pages.

> Exclamation points were

Don McCahill — Fri, 4 Jan 2008 08:22:41 -0800

> Exclamation points were called “screamers”.

Place I worked at years back called them a “bang”.

German terms would be great

Ehague — Fri, 4 Jan 2008 06:44:44 -0800

German terms would be great

Looking forward to hearing

eriks — Thu, 3 Jan 2008 21:17:02 -0800

Looking forward to hearing about the offensive and arcane printing terms!
Do you want me to get started on German terms? For all these weird and wonderful terms in English there are those in all the other languages. I only had to learn them in two languages, and that was hard enough.

[i]“Twip” and

popluhv — Thu, 3 Jan 2008 20:52:22 -0800

[i]“Twip” and “tittle” both strike me as particularly obscure. Got any others?[/i]

Now I’m just itchin’ for the chance to say “that tittle needs to be nipped a twip”.

OK. Here’s the possibly

will powers — Thu, 3 Jan 2008 20:18:42 -0800

OK. Here’s the possibly offensive one. Sometimes “deadwood” was set with sorts that were type high, but that had no image on them. They were rectangles that printed black. And they were very easy for proofreaders and comps to spot.

In many hot-metal shops, even unto the 1980s, the term for them was “niggerhead.” In fact, that is the only term I ever heard for them. & I was pretty startled.

****************
Let me also clarify “deadwood”. That term is used not only for numerical placeholders. Any matter set to indicate where a compositor is to insert other sorts is known as “deadwood.” Or “bogus.” I worked at a Monotype shop where we had to insert Greek, Cyrillic, and Chinese by hand. Keyboard operators set deadwood to the approximately correct width and we comps would insert the non-Latin.

****************
“Workups” were pushed down with special awls known in the type and printing trades as “bodkins.” Or sometimes with a “palm rule.” I wish I still had a set of those.

That’s it for tonight. Gotta go shovel snow.

powers

IE7 at least renders

JCSalomon — Thu, 3 Jan 2008 15:38:41 -0800

IE7 at least renders em & en spaces correctly. IE6 can’t get anything right!
—Joel

How the small caps above

russellm — Thu, 3 Jan 2008 15:34:11 -0800

How the small caps above rendered on IE6.

-=®=-

Oh...way to keep us hanging!

aluminum — Thu, 3 Jan 2008 12:01:04 -0800

Oh...way to keep us hanging! Looking forward to hearing about the offensive and arcane printing terms!

Exclamation points were

will powers — Thu, 3 Jan 2008 06:53:13 -0800

Exclamation points were called “screamers”.

Question marks were called “queries”.

Thin strips of wood spacing are “reglets”.

When spacing material rises in a forme being printed, black marks show between words or between lines. They are called “workups”.

In books, several zeroes were often set to indicate a page number to be inserted later, after the whole book was paginated, as “See page 000.” These zeroes were called “deadwood” or “bogus.”

I can offer more, including one that some may find offensive. but I’m just back at the desk after two weeks off work [and blessedly away from computers] and there are piles of stuff to tend to. So let me get back to this in a day or so.

H N Y to you all.

powers

Fridays, we would “Throw

textwrap — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:02:27 -0800

Fridays, we would “Throw in” at the letterpress shop. We would loosen the quoins, re-stock the furniture and “throw in” or dump the type out and put it all back in the California Job Cases.

I swept the floors while the journeymen differentiated between d’s, p’s, b’s and q’s.

Each browser uses its own

jcrippen — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 14:52:43 -0800

Each browser uses its own nonstandard methods of finding characters that aren’t present in the current font. Hence the different behaviors even on the same operating system with the same fonts.

Arcane Type Terminology

Ehague — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 12:21:37 -0800

“Twip” and “tittle” both strike me as particularly obscure. Got any others?