Hacker News Reader

Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

All this got me to thinking: how did Russel and Whitehead originally compose PM, and how was it typeset? They obviously didn't use TeX. Whatever they did, it must have been a truly staggering amount of work.

For that matter, what is the source material for PM-RW and how is it being processed? Is there a manual translation process from a printed copy of PM, or are they using OCR?

View on HN

You're not gonna believe this, back in the "old days" people cut fonts out of metal. :) People still do it for fun and profit. The Blue Ox Mill in Oregon has classes on fontcutting.

Oh, I was well aware of that, but that is just a small part of the story. What I was wondering is the details of the process by which R&W got the ideas out of their heads and into the metal. Surely they didn't carve the typeface by hand themselves?

Why would they? There would have been any number of typographers handling such work, and several already working for Cambridge and Oxford books...

I believe that they would have written the manuscript, probably by hand but possibly aided by a typewriter, and then given it to a typographer (probably one with experience working on mathematical material) who would have typeset it, cutting any new symbols required.

I'm not a historian but this seems like the only plausible process given the technology around at the time.

Yes, generally the mathematician would write the manuscript & others would turn it into a printable form. IIRC, some people (typographers) created moveable type with math symbols that would then be set in place by a typesetter; if that wouldn't work, a plate for a page would be created. Very expensive & laborious.

I believe that the "backward-E" and later the "upside-down-A" are that way because then you did NOT need to create a new metal symbol; you could simply reuse a capital E and A and put them in upside down. I can't find a citation for this. There's other history here: https://jeff560.tripod.com/set.html

Interesting paper here: https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/russelljournal/article/view/208...

>They obviously didn't use TeX. Whatever they did, it must have been a truly staggering amount of work.

Well, tons of math books have been typeset before digital typesetting and/or TeX, they had the knack of it by the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com