Re: space(s) after period

[Xywrite3plus@xxxxxxxx]

Not that we want to return to all that work, but I too began journalism when
it meant late night runs to the printer's shop to assist in setting (and,
often, rewriting) the heds with a composing stick (the hed writers were
supposed to have done the character counts to make 'em fit, but it was an art
that many editors never really seemed to get); reading type on (literal)
galleys; locking up the quoins in the chases; making "stone" proofs with a
hand roller for the ink and a wooden mallet and wood block to rap sharply
against a sheet of paper you'd place on top of the inked type to pull the
proof.

Made you appreciate what could be done (and what couldn't) when
photomechanical composition came in (punched holes in paper tape replaced the
stick, the wedges, the thin spaces, etc.--but just try to fix the coding of a
long tape, as I did once, by hand-cutting holes with an Xacto knife!). The
coding, by the way, for line width, justify, type size, etc., usually began
with a control character called a bell (I don't doubt that the bell was a
leftover from linotype days, but I never got to operate one of those machines
before they were mostly junked). I've often thought the embedded triangles
in XyWrite's normal display mode resembled the bells, and they performed the
same functions (and, of course, then some!). When I worked nights as a
photocompositor, they started you on community phone books (Aarrgh!). If you
got very good a touchtyping the numbers (and who wouldn't, out of
self-preservation?), you got to do the grocery store ads--with reverse
leading for the cents part of the prices, and the wierd dingbats that had to
be "flashed" just about anywhere on the page.

Enuf nostalgia for the mud!

Peter Brown
psjrbrown@xxxxxxxx

In a message dated 06/03/2002 5:43:28 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
Brucefelk@xxxxxxxx writes:

> I have enjoyed the thoughtful and interesting exchanges among  , Kathleen
> Tinkel (courtesy of Bill Troop), Dorothy Day, and who started it slips my
> mind. In 1932-35 after school hours I was a kid printer's devil at a
> small-town Illinois weekly-cum-printshop, graduating to compositor, and I
> set
> type into a stick, then fitted it into the press form, eventually
> distributing it back into the font or case.
>