David Possin wrote as follows.
quote
In German it was common to use a macron over m and n to show mm and nn,
I saw it being written this way up to the 1970's. But I never saw it
used for any other double letters.
Dave
end quote
There is a very interesting document entitled The Gutenberg Press available
as a file named gbpmanual.pdf from the Walden Font website.
The website address is as follows.
The address for the file is as follows.
http://www.waldenfont.com/public/gbpmanual.pdf
On page 14 are some special characters, ligatures and abbreviations, as used
by Gutenberg.
Searching through the table is great fun so I will only mention here the
first entry in the table which shows a letter a with a horizontal line over
the top which is stated as "am, an" in the pdf file.
The Walden Font website also has some sample fonts showing some of the
characters in each font. With the Gutenberg sample some of the special
characters with a horizontal line over the top are in the sample. I managed
to find them using the Insert Symbol facility of Word 97 on a Windows 98
platform.
I have also experimented using WordPad on a Windows 98 platform and found
that I could get one of the characters by using Alt+0200.
I also managed to get that same character into WordPad on an older Windows
95 PC.
I have not referred to the line over the top as a macron as I am not sure
whether it is a macron. I say not sure because I am learning and am not
sure in that context, not in any way because I am expressing a learned
opinion on the matter or anything like that.
The document refers to Gutenberg having 290 characters in his typeset.
However, the Walden Font font seems not to have that many characters, so
perhaps someone might like to say something about Gutenberg's character set
please.
An email correspondent recently informed me that Gutenberg used a qv
ligature. Does anyone know please of what ligatures and abbreviations were
used by Gutenberg, if any, which are not in Walden Font font please?
I recently saw a television programme in the United Kingdom about Gutenberg
not having used a reusable matrix for typecasting but having to make a new
matrix for each casting, without the benefit of having a punch to make the
matrix. This was discovered by really high magnification of characters in
some of Gutenberg's printing. It appears that the type was reused on
different pages but that no two versions of the same letter on any given
page were congruently identical.
William Overington
9 August 2002
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