Moved to Chat for severe thread-drift: At 02:15 AM 5/26/04 +1000, David Collyer wrote:
> From the time I used to be a varietyper composer operator at North >Finchley, London, in 1971, I recall that there is also a relationship >between picas, ems and ens, but can't for the life of me remember what it >is, except that an em is bigger than an en. >Today they're just handy words for scrabble :) Since I keep a copy of the second edition of the Merriam-Webster New International Dictionary handy, I quickly learned that an en is half an em. Um? The entry for "em" more informatively said that it's the square of the body of a type, and is so called because "m" used to be a square letter. Under "type", they have pictures of "em quads". Then I had to look up quad -- it's a blank piece of type used for making spaces. Which explains why the squares in the illo are bigger all around than the letters with them. (The type body has to be bigger than the character embossed on it.) Bet they had fun getting the em quads propped up high enough to print; this edition is old enough to be letterpress. Probably not hand-set, though. -- Joy Beeson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where the Weather Underground says that it's safe to hang out a load of wash. To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
