New to Typophile? Accounts are free, and easy to set up.
Poliphilus Attachment for Monotype Caster?
Posted by quadibloc in
1 Nov 2011 — 11:04am
1 Nov 2011 — 11:04am
I was visiting http://www.letterpress.ch and while some information pages are no longer valid, the .PDF downloads are still there.
In reviewing the unit arrangements for a few of the well-known typefaces, I found out that in Poliphilus, the capital letter W was 21 units wide, which is more than 18 units. In fact, looking at the unit arrangements document, I see that several other typefaces go over 18 units; several have characters that are 20 units wide, and a few go up to 25, 28, or even 29 units.
User login
Support our Sponsors
1 Nov 2011 — 1:21pm
If you're asking how this is possible or how it is implemented, it's necessary to type a "high space" before these characters, because they obviously kern off the lefthand edge of the type body. If that wasn't your question or you already knew that, sorry.
2 Nov 2011 — 9:17am
Thank you for the answer; this is my question: how characters above 18 units were handled.
I'm surprised, though, that this was done so... routinely. I would have thought that the characters would have been scaled to fit 18 units (not by changing their general size - a higher set would be used) so as to avoid anything as cumbersome as that. Even several sizes of Caslon Old Face, I've found, had this property.
3 Nov 2011 — 4:10pm
Also: for trying to help, even if you had gotten my question wrong, I would still owe you thanks, and you would not owe me an apology.
4 Nov 2011 — 12:59pm
You're very welcome. I learned this working on a Monotype caster this past summer. They also have two different keys for a, e, and o: one set sets the letters with a negative left kern, for using after T, V, etc. A lot to remember. So to type "Wa", you had to type a high space, then W, and then remember to use the alternate "a" key. But yes, it is strange that you need to use a high space so frequently. I think the reason they couldn't just make the character bodies wider is that the lead would take too long to cool and mess up the caster somehow. This is why I was told that you can't type em/em/em/em etc to fill out a blank line. You need to type en/en/en/en because having too many wide characters in a row causes problems as the metal cools.
Josh