Re: "Kerning?"

["..." adpf@xxxxxxxx]

≪	In Holland the old drukkersknecht (journeymen printers) called
cast type koudrukschrift, "cold letters". By cold, I mean foundry type. I
was a summer intern at Mouton & Co in Den Haag almost forty years ago,
where some books were still being hand printed in a conscious claim to
the Haarlem tradition of the punch, the matrix, and the mould. Those guys
said that kerning started at the end of the 17th century in response to
the fashion for italics. [...] ≫ --Robert Holmgren


Hi, Robert. Interesting peek into another place and time. What's known
today as cold type didn't exist. Knowing the handbook would be succinct,
I just looked up the terms we've been discussing in "Pocket Pal," which
(if you're unfamiliar with it) International Paper has kept current since
1934.

Quoting ...

hot type    Cast metal type.
cold type   Type produced by means other than hot metal.
digitized
typesetting  In typographic imaging, the creation of typographic
        characters and symbols by the arrangement of black
        and white spots called pixels or pels.
kerning    In typesetting, subtracting the space between
        two characters, to be closer together.
letterspacing The placing of additional space
        between each letter of a word.

... endquote.

By this definition, I suppose wood type and digital type might be
considered cold type, but in the U.S. these days cold type is generally
understood to mean type set by dedicated computer systems like
CompuGraphic vs. digital type (dtp) vs. hot (molten lead) type.
And wood is wood, as in "going to the wood," in press parlance
playing a story big--requiring wood type. Till relatively recently,
the NYPost still used wood on page 1.

A guy named Dick Weltz
(http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/SpectrumLang
Spectrum Multilanguage Communications, NYC "America's leading
translators & foreign language typesetters") posts such pithy stuff
to comp.publish.prepress and comp.fonts on matters like these I sometimes
wish I had some foreign-language printing needs just so I could reward him
with some business. A no-nonsense dude who really knows type.

≪	BTW, what does "dude" mean to you? Not part of my vocabulary. ≫

I guess you were living abroad in the late '60s/early '70s when it
entered the vernacular as a synonym for "guy." ... Ciao. 	--a

============================= adpFisher  nyc