Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
I saw operas where the letters
were narrower on some words, and sometimes even turned vertical with
common
short words. (As a kid I'd also noticed how newspapers sometimes spaced
letters in individual words further apart to justify lines of text. I
must've been a stranger kid than I remember.)
Many old hymnals, which were commonly set with hand-set music type as
late as about 1950 used this technique; some longer words in the lyrics
would be abbreviated ("thru" for "through"), or in some cases, used
mixed typefaces, so that where most of the lyric might be set in 10
point Century Schoolbook, very long words were set in 10 point Century
Schoolbook Condensed. Similarly with newspapers, where spacers were
used between letters for the purpose of justification, and where in
which old (100 years or so) examples I have also seen mixed typefaces.
Did you ever know that this kind of word spacing is only done in
British or American (or other Anglo-Saxon) Newspapers, never in German
papers, and to my knowledge also never in French papers?
I never worked out why...
I can't say I ever noticed it, but I may know a reason why it was the
case in German typesetting. I was taught in my high school German
classes that in printing of German, it was the custom to use spacing to
indicate emphasis where in English emphasis is used by other
alterations: underlining, or using an italic typeface. Further,
German used Fraktur type forms much later than English did, and I would
submit that Fraktur did not lend itself nearly as well to condensation
as Roman faces did.
ns
_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
