h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A clockwork powered radio? Wow, I want one... I did see them for sale in about 1999, and they must still be around. Battery saving!

I still have and use a Brother manual typer with both those characteristics, a lower case l for a one, and ' and . for an ! Problem is getting ribbons for it. I can't use the Panasonic electronic typer any more, cos I can't get the tape for it - "obsolete technology", shop assistants keep telling me, and yet it's less than a decade old!

How did I miss the programme - and the discussion? Real life, maybe

>>What I was going to say really, was about the programme on fonts, linked above. I listened right the way through and didn't really learn much. It said in several different ways that the type of font you use gives character to the content of what you are saying, with references to advertising, business correspondence, job applications etc. This was no news to me, although it did produce some amusing analogies.

What I would have liked to have been told is:
who designs the things,

Typographers



what has changed since printing started in the 13th century,

Um, well, we no longer have to carve movable letters out of wood, metal, etc, we can bugger them up on computers!


who thinks up those weird names,

Typographers


how much it costs to have a font devised and how people go about it,

As much as you can get away with charging - study letterform, design your font, patent it and persuade people to use it.


why we feel we need more fonts,

Do we? I think I can do a lot with what is available, but, hey, what do I know? Maybe we do.


How you check that you have actually devised a font which doesn't already exist.

Checkout font lists, the British Library, the Patent Office, etc.


Why I can't tell the difference between some fonts

Because you are not looking closely enough - check out the ascenders, descenders, the weight of the strokes, the forming of key letters like 'a' and 'g' 'e' 'j', etc, the kerning and letterspacing, etc.


which fonts are used for official documents, and do certain official bodies actually have rules about which font for what.

There are strict guidelines for all official documents which must be adhered to - I could tell you what they are, including style for headings, sub-heads, body text, leading, kerning, preferred spelling, etc, etc, but I am bound by the Official Secrets Act! In any case is in book form and haven't the time or inclination. Like any worthwhile organisation governmental bodies have addressed the way they want their documents to look.


Why microsoft chose Arial as their default - is it supposed to reflect something (in the light of the points made in the programme)?

Not sure, it is a crap font, but quite easily read on screen.


Why others (other than MS) have Times Roman as the default font?

Times Roman was a font created for the newspaper in the days of hot metal, it is an upright font, almost perfect in its kerning and dipthongs, very readable even at minute point size, an industry standard and has been unsurpassed of its type (sic), it is the font you should use in letters to your bank manager, etc. It is a very straight-forward typeface and screams reliability, honour, truth, etc.


Also related - a subject we have touched on here - the introduction and use of capital letters.

Capital letters have always been in use, remember the illuminated monks' bibles, etc. There are typefaces that only have capital letters, normally only used for titling (though youngsters with puters will try to use for text <sick&gt. Like on the internet capitals are SHOUTING! Especially if slab serif as per Sun, etc. Bauhaus-style don't use any caps at all, but can get confusing in certain circumstances - one can minimalise too much. Upper and lower case is much easier for the majority of human brains to understand (see Times New Roman).


And the answer to other questions I haven't even thought of.

Well ask them and I'll put in my pennyworth!


Doesn't anyone do any research any more?

No not much, bloody lazy bs!


isn't a documentary supposed to present facts, not opinions and vague speculations and amusing comments?

Um, you'd have thought so, wouldn't you Lowest common denominator springs to mind - why should they educate when they can spin a 15 minute programme out to an hour, ask a few stupid questions that viewers phone into at great expense in order to pay for the aforementioned badly researched prog.


No offence Potholer - I enjoyed listening, just didn't think the programme was worth the money they probably spent on it.


Gnomon

There isn't a huge difference between all the different types of serif fonts. They all look much the same as Times New Roman.

Baskerville?
Franklin Gothic?
Cooper Black?
Wot?


Equally, there's not a huge variation in the sans-serif fonts. They all look like Arial.

B*llocks!
Univers
Gill Sans
Slab
Stone
Wot?


Potholer

Regarding font designers, the only one whose name I remember of the top of my head is Hermann Zapf, who designed the Zapf Chancery and Zapf Dingbats fonts on the Apple Laserwriter Plus, as well as presumably many more.

Baskerville
Bodoni
Caxton
Gill
Cooper
Franklin
Bell
Erhardt
Goudy

And lots more

And Elite is fine if used in moderation, spacing too wide and harks back to old typewriter - please youngsters stop using it for whole slabs of text - makes me

I love my old typewriter(s). (Though I admit, they don't look as good as some of the fonts on this computer...) But the beauty of them is (if I can get the ribbon(s), they're EMP and power cut proof!

>> ..clockwork powered radio? <<

They are indeed marvelous. I have one that looks like something from Star Trek. It has a large rechargable space-age battery inside that can power a flashlight/torch beam which can be adjusted to a 'lamp' configuration that is more than enough to light up a room and read by. It also has a strobe light in red or white, both AM/FM radio bands and a howler siren.

In addition to its principal feature, the hand cranked dynamo, there are a few solar cells imbedded in its clear plastic handle and incredibly these are sufficient - or do I mean 'so efficient' - in keeping the rechargable battery charged that I have never really ever had to 'crank' up the tunes.

It also has provision for normal 3 x C-type battery operation. The instructions say this is a back-up system for those foggy days and sunless nights when you're too tired to crank. But I've never installed any because I thought that NOT burning up lead cell batteries was what the whole exercise was about.

It does gladden my heart to see such ancient technology as the woundspring clockwork being put to use in the 21st century as a source of of power for micro-voltage applications. Now if they could just get me a wind up microwave oven I could reheat my coffee.

~jwf~

That sounds like a great thing to have, jwf... The one I saw in an electronic shop (!) was pretty much like that. I to think it's a great thing for this time in history.

>> But doesn't distance lend enchantment? <<

Indeed it can and often does elevate a mundane expression into an air of mystery.

For example, if I were to say someone was 'in the limelight' it would probably be understood by most that the person in question is receiving a great deal of public attention. But few would be aware that the expression is centuries old and comes from the theatre. A deliberately set fire in the theatre.

Across the front of the stage ran a trough or a series of pots containing a volatile chemical mixture including powdered lime, the same powdered rock that is used to make cement or to decompose rotting corpses.

The chemical was set alight and the slow smouldering fire was shielded from the audience by a low curved metal 'shade' which was painted dark on the audience' side. But it was polished to a reflective mirror finish on the concave inside facing the stage and it created a wide pale-green glow that illuminated the entire upstage area.

Today along the front edge of the stage we have electric lights in 'pots' and the whole shebang are called the 'footlights' just as they were when the front of the stage was actually set alight with limestone powders.

Remember this is centuries before electricity and the incandescent bulb, and even dozens of decades before the first gas lighting. It was in effect an open fire on the stage that burned slowly and (relatively) cooly. It created and sustained as strange and magical a 'space' for early theatre goers as films, TV and laser light shows would later do in the 20th century.

Those who understand what the terms 'downstage' and 'upstage' mean will appreciate that limelight was mostly an upstage thing. It could only cast light on the feet of any actors pushed further downstage. So it was the most vain or the most popular performers who would dare to step squarely into the limelight and claim the public attention. The public attention is a hard mistress, hard to gain and harder to maintain.

~jwf~

The reason I remembered Zapf was that at first I thought it was some kind of company name, but it seemed an odd name to deliberately choose, and it's the kind of name you don't easily forget, especially after having typed 'ZapfChancery' out innumerable times when playing around with PostScript on Laserwriters.

Names like Goudy, Baskerville, they sound like they could easily have been deliberately chosen for effect, rather than being the name of an actual designer. Even with Caxton, without specific knowledge, it's easy to imagine that the font could have been named *after* him, rather than designed *by* him.

It does go to show how little-publicised the designers generally are. I suppose the only other person I'm really aware of who designed type was the designer of the London Underground map, and the main reason I know about him is from hearing about the map, rather than just the associated type.


Limelight in the theatre dates from ~1820s, and was generally a lump of quicklime heated to incandescence by an oxy/hydrogen flame, and used for spotlighting.
More regular low-power gaslighting in theatres dates from around the same time, replacing oil lamps, which had replaced candles. The front-of-stage chemical trough sounds a bit unlikely, and possibly a little hazardous.

~jwf~
I thought the actual 'limelights' were solid blocks of stone, rather than powder, and they were heated, by a gas flame, I believe, until they radiated light, rather than being 'set on fire'.
http://www.chem.leeds.ac.uk/delights/texts/Demonstration_19.htm

Although ~jwf~'s explanation of limelight is often repeated on the internet, Encyclopaedia Britannica agrees with Ictoan.

"Encyclopaedia Britannica agrees with Ictoan"

I like the way you phrase that

Having seen limelights demonstrated, Potholer is correct, although I thought the gas used was acetylene.
The acetylene being generated by dripping water on carbide, as also used in old caving lamps.
So jwf's mention of noxious chemicals would be nearly right.

What I liked form the link I posted was the paragraph about them actually being dual purpose, and using the hydrogen flame, without oxygen, to cause what they referred to as 'flame luminesance'. Not just a spotlight but backlighting/mood lighting as well!

"luminescence"

Hey, anybody wanna see what a gnomon looks like in full bloom?
A3332233


~jwf~

I've put the same gnomon picture on my gnomon page A620506.

Anybody know the origin of the phrase 'grabbing the wrong end of the stick?'

Yup. Roman.
Same as the '$#!++y end of the stick' and other permutations.

Coming back in rather late and catching up...Thems as is interested in cutting-edge 'fontography' may want to check out a guy called Chank Diesel (http://www.chank.com). He has some free font downloads.

I once read a journalist describing how he tried to explain what a typewriter was to his young daughter. She concluded that it was 'Sort of like a computer without a display but with a printer, only you can't save or edit your work.'

'I've been to holiday in San Serif!'

(Gnomon) >>Fonts with serifs are generally considered to be easier on the eye.
(hopeful)>>Some of the guidelines I have seen suggest that fonts with serifs are easier on the eye on the printed page, while those without are easier to read on screen.

Sort of...and I'm the kind of guy that would write such guidelines.

We read different things in different ways. If we are reading a body of text, our eyes skip allong the top of each line in 'saccades' of approximately 0.3 sec. Serifs on lower case letters reinforce an illusion of a straight edge and gives us anchor points which help us to control our movements.

With other text - menus, titles - our reading is 'iconic'. We don't need to skip along. We need to pick it up and take it in as a lump. Serifs may (speculatively) interfere with this because they add extraneous background noise to the basic letter shape.

There is some experimental evidence which suggests that serif fonts are advantageous for printed material. For computers, the evidence is less clear, since the limitations of display resolution mean that serif detail is compromised.

Pragmatically, the MS Word default styles seem sensible for printed text: a basic serif font for main text and a sans serif to distinguish the headings.

For web pages and the like, it could well be useful to separate out text and menus in a similar way. However, since this can also be done spatially, there are no great advantages to serif fonts. I, personally, would come down on the side of sans serif - the intuition being that resolution considerations mean that they are less compromised - but I don't pretend to be able to point at any good experimental evidence. They just look better! But screens are not the best medium for reading large amounts of text anyway.