@Heliograph I was wondering why that E is so big but it's of course because @volpeon mondays exist

@Heliograph And the palaeographic names are "majuscule" and "minuscule".

@Heliograph TIL space is lowercase

@Heliograph so is dropcase for the letters that fell on the floor?

@Heliograph
This is funny 😀 never thought about it.
In Finnish we talk about big and small letters 😅

@Heliograph fun fact, "boilerplate" also comes from physical typesetting! It came from the plate metal which was formed with type on and could then be distributed to different newspapers

@Heliograph this confirms that numbers are lower case characters.

@Heliograph very very interesting!

@Heliograph@mastodon.au

Even more fun without a type-machine.
I used to do letterpress, more fun setting type by sight with tweezers.
Helps to be left handed - reverse type.

@Heliograph We had those when I was working on my college newspaper, and later when I worked for a publishing company as a book editor in the 1960s and early 1970s. Then they gave way to computerized printing.

@Heliograph suddenly wondering about the origins of camelCase and snake_case

@Heliograph
When I explain that to my students, with other litlle stories about keyboard content (such as why Shift is named Shift, why the letters on the keyboard are upercase and top left of the key, etc.), they totally discover that and are amazed!

Most of the users don't have a clue about typography vocabulary origin (font, case, etc.) and keyboard (strange) disposition.

@Heliograph Yep. Took a printing class in Junior High in the 60’s, and that’s how we did it. More info for anyone curious: https://www.google.com/search?q=hand+setting+type

@Heliograph Would be amusing to start the rumor that the arrangement of letters in that box was chosen to prevent typesetters from colliding with each other reaching for adjacent letters and getting stuck

@Heliograph where is the edge case?

@Heliograph My 1960’s high school required boys to take shop (girls took home ec) including a term of print shop. The first week included memorizing the lower case layout. Later we locked a page, inked the platen, and printed.