From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Sun Oct 25 2009 - 03:54:59 CST
On 23 Oct 2009, at 10:57, William_J_G Overington wrote:
> An interesting point is as to why Gutenberg had so many ligatures!
> With metal type in the twentieth century the making of an additional
> ligature was a lot of extra work in that an additional metal punch
> to make metal matrices had to be produced. Today, with electronic
> fonts, the constructing of an extra ligature glyph also takes extra
> work.
>
> Yet was the same true for Gutenberg? Did ligatures in fact save
> Gutenberg work?
A reason cited is that the 42-line Bible was made to look like the
hand-written ones. The initials were hand painted in different colors,
blue and red, with extra drawings in the margins, according to the
taste of the customer. And labour was cheap at the time.
Hans
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