Over the years, some of the letters were lost or broken, but they were horrendously expensive to replace. Since business wasn't booming and we couldn't afford to pay him much in the first place, our printer figured we could make do with what he had. Rs left in our favorite headline font. When I graduated from college and found a job on a daily newspaper with a seemingly unlimited supply of Rs, I knew I'd hit the big time. Three decades later, we've moved from an age of scarcity into an age of typographic overload.
Metal type is a thing of the past.
Thanks to powerful processors, sophisticated software and cheap but versatile printers, virtually every computer desktop is a potential publishing house. Create a document in Microsoft Word or Wordpad, click on the arrow next to the font window at the top of the page, and a long list of typefaces appears. You'll find a lot more if you use desktop publishing or graphics programs. Some users get hooked on fonts. They prowl the Web, looking for free or low-cost typefaces.