Yes, typography does drive men mad, and it's not just computer scientists: http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21591793-legendary-typeface... It is interesting that millenia have passed since people began using pen and ink to embody language in print, but designers still adhere to the lines, angles, and curves that evoke that ancient technology. Would it be fun to change the rules and see what happens? Is there a better way to represent letters? Blobs and spikes and gradients? Holographic overlays of angles and lines? Something that renders a page nicely even when subjected to ebook presentation? The letters of words compressed into ideographs? On Beyond Zebra? Hilarie
From: Scott Kim <scottekim@icloud.com> Subject: Re: [math-fun] Backwards W?
You're right, the W is backwards. This sort of thing happens a lot, and it drives typography-minded people like me crazy (but no one else). Here's why.
Typefaces, or at least typefaces based on classical Roman letters, which your example W (font is Palatino) most definitely is, are based on handwritten calligraphic forms. Traditional broad-edged pen calligraphy, which was used to create the original capital letters in Roman times, and continues to be taught in calligraphy classes, uses a pen whose tip is not a point or a small rolling sphere, but instead a wide thin rectangle. A right-handed calligrapher normally nolds such a pen so the wide dimension of the pen tip is tilted up-hill to the right at an angle off horizontal of 30 to 45 degrees. See here for illustration: http://www.calligraphy-skills.com/how-to-write-calligraphy.html <http://www.calligraphy-skills.com/how-to-write-calligraphy.html>
Drawing letters with such a pen means drawing strokes without turning the angle of the wide end, which naturally creates thick strokes when you stroke down to the right, as in the first and third strokes of a W, and thin strokes when you stroke down to the left, (or up to the right) as in the second and fourth strokes of a W. This is also the reason the right strokes of a capital A is thick, and that the letter O appears to be tilted to the left, with the thin spots at 11 and 5 o'clock.
If you want to demonstrate this to someone else, it's best to have some visual examples like the aforementioned web page, or better yet, a cheap calligraphic felt-tip pen and some paper. But don't expect most people to be persuaded to mend the errors of their A's (and W's).
Scott Kim, Puzzlemaster Shufflebrain C: 650-204-1577 http://scottkim.com scottekim@icloud.com