![]() The back-to-front characters were assembled tightly together to make up ‘lines of text’ and pages. Here is an illustration of what one letter (in this example, a lower case ‘m’) looked like. Setting large quantities of car registration numbers or postcodes could be a problem if you used standard founts. Therefore, in English, a fount of type would have a greater quantity of lower-case ‘e’ than anything else, and perhaps only a handful of seldom used letters such as a capital ‘Q’ or ‘Z’. But I might be leaping forward too quickly here and presuming a knowledge of typesetting before computers, or indeed before photosetting (also called filmsetting), the latter of which started to dominate in the early 1970s. This was not a job for the fainthearted and not a job for the untrained.Ī fount of ‘type’ is an overall quantity of characters of any given size, having differing quantities of letters, numerals and punctuation marks, in proportions worked out by hundreds of years of experience and according to their expected frequency of use for different kinds of jobs. Each individual character (known as a ‘sort’) was carefully spaced with extraordinary expertise and made up into pages or whatever. Glossing over hundreds of years of development, all you need to know (for now) is that typesetting used to be done by assembling individual characters, back-to-front, each made out of metal or (for the much larger sizes, wood) from a ‘fount’ of type. It started when American software programmers took the word ‘fount’ (pronounced ‘font’) spelt it wrongly, and then with a scatter-gun approach replaced the already existing correct word ‘typeface’ for no good reason. (Sadly the word ‘literally’ is now in common usage incorrectly too.) It is another software abomination, where developers either borrow a valid technical term from (in this instance) typography and typesetting, that had been happily in use minding its own business for several centuries and apply it to a different concept, or they invent an expression, such as ‘font size’, to describe something that is simply inappropriate – and indeed literally speaking cannot exist. Things can get worse still, where the uninformed then corrupt the words, and the spelling, and we end up with something incomprehensible so what exactly do computer software writers – and now users of most software – think they mean when they say ‘font size’? It can then take a grip rapidly and spread like a disease. Sadly, the reverse is also true when uninformed people use valid expressions they have heard experts use and then trot them out wrongly, and so mislead the listener or reader. Other than those who seek to keep historic technology alive and in use, how many people ‘hang up’ their telephones? Or indeed ‘dial’ the number in the first place. It is commonplace for archaic terms to remain in daily use, often to the point where present users have no experience of the act they are describing and frequently not knowing from what the expression derives. ![]()
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