Talk:History of Western typography/Archive 1

message: Dear 66.82.9.83, your addition (reposted below) to Typography lies outside the scope of the section, Gutenberg's hand mould, the text of which is concerned with the signifigance of Gutenberg's invention and the hand mould itself—but not punchcutting, or a critique of Gutenberg's invention, or the history of early printing in Europe. That stuff belongs in Johannes Gutenberg, punchcutting, or the history of printing.
:Gutenburg's key invention, the custom metal font, was the first practical means of making cheap copies of documents in small quantities needed to print a single book. The essential pieces of hardware and techniques that make a punch matrix process viable and profitable, the hand mold, fully hardened steel punches,matrices and type have been found later in the Low Countries, but no hand mold, punches, type or matrices have ever been found that was associated positively with Gutenberg. It was when the materials were all robust enough, that European typography broke away from its Eastern forebearers with a letter-casting process that needed no post-processing touch-up for each letter, as both Gutenberg and the Koreans are documented to have required. With the more robust process, huge printing runs were possible with modest investme, and paper became the bottleneck.
I've snipped the text out and preserved it here, and reverted the article text back to the previous version 
Arbo talk 16:10, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Addition to Gutenberg's Hand Mould section bucks scope of section 

message: :This thing has a misleading name. So-called "disc". It's a while since I read that article but I remember now, thanks for reminding, it is actually dish-shaped. "Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier recovered this remarkably intact "dish"...". The real thing was a dish, but it's known as the "disc" and the first thing you see in that article is the flattened disc-shaped replica.
:And John Man calls it a clay "disc", never even mentioning the real object is a dish. :-)
:This account (not very comprehensive) supports the typo-view, but they only show the flat replica disc, omitting all mention of the original dish.
:The WP account says the symbols have been allotted unicode positions for any future digital font versions, but that doesn't make the original object a font.
:Right...I just downloaded the font from here. Install the font Everson Mono Phaistos on your computer and you can type with the symbols by copying them to the clipboard from the private use area of Windows character map. Kids! Make your own Phaistos disc at home. ;-)
:Rewrite
:Printing with multiple types seems to have first occurred around 1700 BC. The mysterious Phaistos Disc—a 15 centimeter ceramic dish-shaped object with 241 tokens printed into the surface—may have been an early form of "page" typography. The true purpose of the so-called "disc" is unknown. See also: Blickensderfer typewriter.
:Weasle version
====The mysterious Phaistos "dish"====
Combining multiple types in a single punch-like device seems to have first occurred around 1700 BC. The mysterious Phaistos "dish"—a 15 centimeter ceramic dish-shaped device with 241 tokens molded in relief (comprising 45 unique glyphs)—is probably an early Dymo labelling machine. Sure, put money on it. The true purpose of the so-called Phaistos "dish" is anybody's guess, but my friend Amanda heard that many believe it really is a primitive computer "floppy" disc. Also try: Chickenbacher typewriter.
:Surrealist version
====The mysterious Phaistos "fish"====
Combining multiple fish in a single fish-like device seems to have first occurred in the fish century BC. The mysterious Phaistos "fish"—a 15 meter ceramic fish-shaped device with 241 tokens molded in scales (comprising 45 unique fish glyphs)—is obviously a fish labelling machine. Sure, put money on it. The true purpose of the so-called Phaistos "fish" is anybody's guess, but my friend Amanda heard that many believe it really is a primitive computer "floppy" fish. 
Also try: Hackenbacher Nightrider.
:Arbo talk 18:01, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Phaistos dish

message: Combining multiple fish in a single fish-like device seems to have first occurred in the fish century BC. The mysterious Phaistos "fish"—a 15 meter ceramic fish-shaped device with 241 tokens molded in scales (comprising 45 unique fish glyphs)—is obviously a fish labelling machine. Sure, put money on it. The true purpose of the so-called Phaistos "fish" is anybody's guess, but my friend Amanda heard that many believe it really is a primitive computer "floppy" fish. 
Also try: Hackenbacher Nightrider.
:Arbo talk 18:01, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The mysterious Phaistos "fish"

message: Is the article too detailed? I set out to make it exhaustive, but it does seem to be getting long with three centuries to go.
Any suggestions for scaling it down?
Arbo talk 18:39, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Weight loss program 

message: The following material is expurgated stop-gap sections, now suitable for expansion into a History of typography 1800 – 21st century.
Arbo talk 13:53, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Excess material 

message: State-of-the-art digital typographic systems have solved virtually all the demands of traditional typography and have expanded the possibilities with many new capabilities. The matrix system of Gutenberg lends itself well to a soft approach.
See:
* Desktop publishing 
* Web publishing
* Dynamic Web page
* Dynamic HTML
* LaTeX
* Print culture
Arbo talk 00:29, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [[21st century]]&mdash;the digital era

message: Uncivil talk, cranks, trolls & disruptive behaviour on this talk page will be removed on-sight.
Arbo talk 13:03, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Old warnings

message: The questions discussed above and thought to be resolved have been brought up again on the Village Pump (Policy), three days ago, but not seen till now. I've commented there, although it does not seem the right place.DGG 05:21, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: further discussion on VP

message: When I created the History article from Typography I was following WP's in-built linguistic systemic bias, not by choice but by perforce of pre-existing linguistic bias.
Now, do we move Typography and Font > Western typography and Western font?
Western typography sounds okay. Western font is starting to sound silly. 
We don't have an articles on Arabic typography, Eastern typography or Cyrillic typography yet. We've got Yiddish typography, but no history of that. Editors with the requisite knowledge of these missing typo articles are at liberty to start writing them.
WP is still in its infancy, and editors who think the English WP has systemic Euro-centric bias should examine the other language WPs, which are far behind us. 
The French, German, Spanish and Italian language WPs all have their own typography articles, their titles being the Latin-derrived word for "typography" in each language. All of them discuss European typography and its history only, making little or no mention of typography of other civilizations. They aren't far along enough yet to have split their histories into separate articles either, eg: Histoire de Typographie does not exist yet in the French WP.
If the english WP renames Typography to Western typography, what should we do with Typography?
Arbo talk 13:07, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Systemic bias of English/Indo-Germanic European language WP

message: :James - thanks!  But perhaps moving the present article is too drastic. Clearly, most of what is typography today did happen in Europe, esp if we are talking English typography - so just a subsection or two on the antecedents in the main article would be all that is needed.  That would be better than having a separate article on Western typography, and leaving some impoverished content for the global one, etc. But we can discuss this on the topic pages. 
:DGG, immediately after posting this comment here I had posted a note on James' talk page, who was the lead architect of the History of Typography article.  Indeed, it is he who told me that such matters could be discussed on the village pump. 
:Thanks to the pointers to systemic bias.  This bias may pervade many articles related to printing, where the Chinese/ Korean discoveries appear to be downplayed.  For example, the lead sentence in the article on Johannes Gutenberg says
::Johannes Gutenberg... invented the European technology of printing with movable type in 1447.
:which gives the impression that the technology of printing with movable type is European, or that it was completely different from any other, earlier,  technology.  But these things are better handled in the relevant pages. mukerjee (talk) 01:40, 19  November 2006 (UTC)
:: As I said on the Gutenberg talk page a few minutes ago, and now copy here, "I think the first sentence is exact: there is a European technology of printing from movable type, it differs from the Asian technogy for doing this, and Gutenberg did invent it. He obviously did not invent all the components, for example paper, or the use of engraving tools. Bias would be if the sentence read, Gutenberg was the inventor of printing from movable type."  For further discussion, I refer to my comments there. 
::And for those who haven't been there to see it, the Gutenberg article has long had--and still does have--a rather longish section on "Was Gutenberg influenced by East Asian printing?"  But, as Mukerjee says, we can continue there--perhaps we've done enough over here.DGG 05:10, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  reposted from Village Pump 

message: Please see the discussion about possible inaccuracy of captioning of the s/i ligature picture at 
Notthe9 18:44, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ligature picture 

message: Avant-garde typography is currently written like an essay, but there's a decent amount of information in it that is missing from History of Western typography. I think that the non-essay-like information from the former should be merged to the latter. signed, Rosguill talk 23:33, 23 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed merge of Avant-garde typography into History of Western typography