The Impossible Chinese Typewriter

The Impossible Chinese Typewriter
Julesy

Chinese is just nuts. It says something about the human mind that it is able to master such a complex writing system.

Linotype

Linotype
YouTube Movies & TV

Kind of long, but totally worthwhile. One of the projects I worked on at my first programming job was a data entry / data base system for a check printing company. They were using Linotype machines to set the personal information that was printed on each check (name, address, what-not). Someone had converted the linotype machines to get their keystrokes over a wire instead of from the mechanical keyboard. They had a room with several of these machines, but no operators. Instead they had a separate room full of girls sitting at computer keyboards typing away. You had to be careful out on the floor where the Linotype machines were because even though they were converted to work with electrical inputs, they still cast hot lead into lines of type, and every now and again there would be a hiccup, and a spurt of hot metal would squirt out of the machine. Those 'hiccups' were referred to as squirt codes on the premise that a bit of code sent down the wire from the computer would cause the machine to hiccup. Actually, it was just the nature of the Linotype machine. Hiccups happened before computers were even a concept. Molten lead is not that hot compared to some things, like molten steel, but it will still burn the hell out of you if you come into contact with it.

I look at the computer systems we use for text these days and while it looks clean and simple from the outside, they are several orders of magnitude more complicated. Construction of the Linotype was dependent on the whole industrial infrastructure that existed back in 1900. Construction of a modern computer needs all of that with a whole additional level of much more complicated machinery and organization.

Given a supply of metal and a machine shop, it ought to be possible to build a new Linotype machine. People have made simple integrated circuits in their garage, but what would it take it make a flat panel display? I have no idea.

Paper Drawings

I'm sitting outside on my backyard patio in my shirtsleeves, drinking a beer, listening to some tunes and just generally enjoying life when my wife appears bearing a sheaf of house plans. We've been on a tear, well, she's been on a tear and I am a willing accomplice, so what's to be done with these plans? Well, they're all plans for the house we spent three years remodeling in Portland. We sold that house in January and we have been trying to purge it from our lives, so we probably ought to just throw them in the recycling bin. I mean, a lot of good paper there. You know, the high quality shit, not that effin newsprint. On the other hand we did spend three frickin' years on that project, so maybe we ought to take look, see if there is anything spectacular in there that might be worth saving. So I spend a couple of minutes paging through them, they're big, D size sheets, two minutes longer than my wife thought they were worth. So I page through them while she stands there fuming.

The paper is being difficult, the sheets won't separate. My fingers are too dry and they just slip on the paper, but I persist (in spite of the steam) and I eventually get through them. Of the two dozen sheets I save three B-size floor plans. During the three years we spent on this project we probably went through a couple hundred sheets of D-size plans, and a similar number of C and B-size drawings. All these plans cost money, some I ordered from Office Depot and some came from design firms. Some came from microfilm. The city used to collect actual paper plans, but a long while ago they started microfilming the plans. Probably mounted the microfilm in IBM cards. The next step was to run them through an automatic scanner and upload a digital version of the image into the great cloud of network servers in the sky. So when I came around and wanted the original plans, I got digital images from the city and sent them to Office Depot.

Used to be there were multiple grades of paper. Things like blueprints didn't get very hi-grade paper, after all they didn't need to last very long. But now you want a print of a digital image, Office Depot will do it for you, but the base grade of paper is like premium paper from before the digital revolution. Now-a-days, printing serves a different purpose than it did before. Anybody can print anything now, but the base service is like what premium service used to be for high volume shops.

I read a story some time ago and someone in the story mentions that he spent the war (WW2 in the UK) at a drafting table, drawing the same bracket over and over again. I was thinking he should have gotten a template printed up that included all the parts of the bracket that weren't subject to change. But then you look at the setup charge, and how big a print run do you want to make? Cheaper by far to just have him draw the whole thing over again. They probably already have a template that included the border and the title box, so that didn't have to be drawn. 

Canon PIXMA Printer

Canon MG Series PIXMA MG2525 Inkjet Photo Printer with Scanner/Copier

Finally broke down and bought a new printer. Darling daughter hasn't replaced the toner cartridge in her laser printer that is sitting in the dining room so the printing was getting a little light. Then the Ziply Fiber guy was here and replaced the router so the wifi address has changed and who knows if that will ever get fixed in the laser printer, so new printer for me. $70, which is probably about the same that a new toner cartridge would cost for the laser printer, and it sits on my desk which means I don't have to run up the stairs to collect my printouts. Ha, like I run anywhere anymore. Probably have to buy new ink cartridges for this one in a few months, and they'll probably cost a zillion dollars because that's how the Inkjet printer business works. Unpacked it, plugged it in, turned it on and it worked.

Back when gas was $2.50 a gallon I was thinking that inflation had cut the value of a dollar by 10 since I started driving 50 years ago, but now gas is $5 a gallon, so the value of a dollar has gone down by a factor of 2 in the last few years, and it's liable to go down by another factor 2 in the next couple of years, which means this printer cost less than $2 in terms of 1970 dollars. (70 / (10 x 2 x 2)). Fifty years ago, you could buy a six pack of Golden Goebels Beer for a buck, which means this printer costs as much as two six-packs of beer. Except mass market beer, like Coors or Bud, costs about $1 a can. Hmmm. What's that old Roman dictum? Bread and circuses? Well, we've got cheap beer and political circuses.

Crossed Up

Part of a cross-written letter from Samuel Randell written in 1854

Reading The Ramada Inn at Shiloh by Allan Gurganus and I come across this:

"I have their letters, cross-written to save paper."

Cross-written? Never heard of it, but I'll bet Google knows, and sure enough it was a real thing. I find it curious that I can actually read it. Well, sort of. I can pick out some words, it's a little difficult, this image is a low rez copy of a 150 year old hand written letter. But just looking at the page the lines of writing going across the page stand out, and the vertical lines almost disappear.

I like cursive. Can't say why. Perhaps because I spent so much time learning it, or because it was so difficult to master. That was the fourth grade I think. Or maybe it's just because it's a nice change of pace from all the printed text I run into every freaking day, most of which is just garbage (the message, not the printed characters). I mean if someone takes the time to write anything out long hand, I am going to take the time to read it because it sure as hell isn't going to be some Search Engine Optimized piece of spamula.

"Cursive" has shown up in this blog a couple of times.

Via Posthip Scott.

Letters

The Coronation of Charlemagne by Friedrich Kaulbach
Illiterate promoter of literacy.

Came across this question on Reddit. The answer was so cogent I thought it worth sharing.

Q: Why do some letters have a completely different character when written in uppercase (A/a, R/r, E/e, etc), whereas others simply have a larger version of themselves (S/s, P/p, W/w, etc)?

A: First of all, let's talk about the words 'uppercase' and 'lowercase'. These words come from the early history of printing, when a person called a typesetter would assemble each page of a book letter by letter. Each letter was a profile on a piece of lead, called a sort. The sorts were kept in boxes called typecases, which had compartments for each letter. There would be a typecase for each font (also called a fount), which was a typeface at a specific size, at a specific weight (bold, medium, etc.), in a specific shape (upright, italic, etc.). A typeface is what we nowadays call a font on computers. There were actually two typecases for each font, and they were kept one on top of the other. The one on top was called the upper case, and contained the 'majuscule' letters; the one on the bottom was called the lower case, and contained the 'minuscule' letters. So the proper names for 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' are 'majuscule' and 'minuscule', respectively.

Now, on to your actual question.

Letters are just simple drawings that have phonetic meanings. (In other words, the symbols represent sounds.) The nature of the symbols is affected by the thing the symbols are written on. For example, one of the earliest writing symbols we have is cuneiform, which was written by making marks with a stylus in a piece of clay. The shape of cuneiform marks is strongly determined by the shape of the stylus.

This is important, because the majuscules and minuscules were originally two forms of the Latin alphabet that were used for writing on different materials, and the same thing applies to the Greek alphabet.

Majuscule letters were originally inscriptional, which means they were carved into stone. The Roman emperor Trajan had his military victories depicted on a carved stone column called Trajan's column; at the base of this column is some writing, in the style of Roman square capitals: this style is common on Roman monuments, but Trajan's column is one of the best known examples. These letters were designed by a scribe painting them on to the stone with a brush; a stonemason would then carve out the painted areas. The motion of the brush created little flairs at the beginning at end of each brush stroke; these flairs are now known as serifs.

However, Romans writing out documents would use Roman cursive. Roman cursive, like all cursive writing forms, is basically a bunch of shortcuts in writing the 'proper' letters.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Roman culture continued to hold considerable sway amongst the barbarians. The same writing styles were preserved, until the Carolingian Renaissance under Charlemagne (Charles the Great) in the Frankish Empire (now France) in the 800s. Charlemagne was a great believer in literacy, and despite never learning to read himself, ordered the creation of a single style of handwriting to be used across his empire, to prevent documents from being misinterpreted. The end result was a pairing of these two writing styles into the majuscule and minuscule letters of a unified alphabet. The minuscule letters, being easier to write quickly, were use normally, but the majuscule letters, with their grand and elegant forms, were used for proper nouns and emphasis. Over the succeeding thousand years, different nations would slowly adapt these letter forms and the relationships between them to their needs: the Italians developed the Humanist minuscule, which later became the italic script; the Germanic peoples developed the blackletter scripts; the Irish developed the insular script. This development continues today, with hundreds of typefaces released each year by type designers.

I don't know why we need hundreds of new typefaces every year. You don't have to go too far down that rat hole before you can't see any difference between supercaligoobilicous and adventualicus. Well, I can't. Those are probably fighting words for people who live in that world.


Cutting letters into stone v-CUT lettering carving letters
Realized while I was working on this that printing and fonts are a recurring topic here.

Gobble-De-Gook

I am filling out an insurance claim form and I notice that the printed text is not very clear. This line in particular is sets a new standard for incomprehensible legalese:

Just another example of our glorious civilization going to hell in a hand-basket.

The Caslon Foundry

Casting Shop, with women breaking off excess metal and rubbing the type at the window

Spitalfields Life has a photo essay about The Caslon Foundry in London, England. They made type for printing presses for 200 years up till 1937. Not a particularly large establishment, merely a four story brick building in Central London. Not a huge campus like the the Colt factory in Hartford, Conneticut.

I was kind of wondering why the company would have collapsed just prior to WW2 just when the demand for newspapers would have skyrocketed, and then I remembered the linotype, another disruptive technology.

Via Indy Tom

Uppercase, Lowercase

We have uppercase (capital) and lowercase (small) letters, but numbers are just numbers, aren't they? It turns out there are a couple of special cases where there are uppercase and lowercase numbers.

It exists in Chinese: 壹贰叁肆伍陆柒捌玖拾 for one to ten. It's supposed to prevent tampering of numbers and is still used in important documents (especially if money is involved)
The "lower case" is 一二三四五六七八九十, which can be altered easily - Reddit

The other case is typography, where they are sometimes called Oldstyle figures.

 Origin of the term here.

Typesetting

Upper Case & Lower Case

Iamna turned up this visual explanation of the origins of a bunch of terms used in typography. The above illustration is only the first.

Fun with Fonts

Lowercase Letter A with a couple of obscure measurements.

I've been working intermittently on my gears program. I want to replace that static initialization with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) that would allow modifications on the fly. One of the first things you need is the ability to write text on the screen. I found and tried a sample program and amazingly it worked. However, the text on the screen was kind of skinny and feeble looking, so I'm going to need a different font, and OMG, what a Pandora's box I have opened.

Back in the good old days before these nasty little PC's took over, any time you needed to talk to a computer you used a terminal. A terminal had a CRT screen that would display (typically) 25 lines with 80 characters each. A serial data cable connected your terminal to the computer, or if you were on another planet, to a modem.

When you pressed a key on the keyboard, the terminal sent the ASCII code for that character to the computer, and when the computer had something to say to you, it sent the ASCII codes to the terminal. Formatting was limited to deciding when to end a line of text. When a line ended, the action moved to the next line. If the screen was full, the line at the top of the screen scrolled off the top and was never seen again.

This worked fine until some people (like SGI) decided they wanted to draw pictures. Then the PC and Windows came along and now things get a little more complicated. When you sent a character code to a terminal, the terminal was hard wired to display that character. There was only one font and only one character set, so on one hand you were restricted with what you could do, on the other you were free from having to learn a whole bunch of obscure bullshit.

Now with modern computers with hi-resolution displays, when you want to write a character to the screen, the computer has to look up picture for that character from the font you have chosen (or had chosen for you) and copy it into display memory in the correct location, which depends on a whole bunch of typesetting and window management rules.

Okay, I don't like the default font, which font should I use? Well, for starters, how many fonts are there? Only about a zillion. I suspect there might be a thousand on the machine I am using. Now some of them are the same font, just rendered in different sizes and / or with special features like bold or italic, and some of them are foreign languages or sets of funny characters, like dingbats or Russian.

Still, there are a bunch of fonts. There has to be a better way to get a handle on them that just listing them using xlsfonts. My first thought was to take the list and edit it into something I could import into a spreadsheet. That might have helped, but it would have been a lot of work, and I would still have a thousand entries. Then I got to thinking I could write a program (using xlsfonts.c as a model) that could identify fonts with common attributes, like typeface, or size, or even just whether they are fixed pitch or proportional fonts.

So I'm poking around in xlsfonts.c and I find a bit of code that determines whether it is a fixed or proportional pitch font, except there is third kind of font called a 'character cell' font, which confuses the heck out of me. I do some digging around and find this:

The type of spacing (S): p (“proportional”) for variable-width fonts, m for monospaced
fonts, c for character-cell fonts. The difference between a monospaced font and a
character-cell font is significant. In monospaced fonts, the offset between the glyph’s
point of origin and that of the following glyph remains unchanged; the glyph it-
self may lie partly or entirely outside the abstract box whose width corresponds to
this offset. In character-cell Fonts, there is one additional property: the pixels of the
glyph, which are entirely contained within this abstract box. A character cell font is
monospaced a fortiori: the converse may not be true. Nonetheless, most monospaeed
fonts (such as Courier or Computer Modem Typewriter) can be regarded as character-
oell fonts, since they simulate the output of the typewriter, which was a source of
inspiration for the character-cell fonts. - Fonts & Encodings by Yannis Haralambous

So, if I am reading this correctly, both monospaced and character-cell fonts allocate a fixed block of space on the screen. Characters from character-cell fonts will appear entirely within this block. However, characters from monospaced may appear anywhere in the universe, well, anywhere on the plane of your display screen. Of course, any character whose location will place it outside of the screen will not appear. Computers are not very smart, but they generally can tell if it can display something or not.

I haven't come across any examples of characters that exist outside the box, they may be used to place accent marks. But that is just a suspicion. They might be used by the NSA to send encrypted messages to their agents or for some other nefarious purpose. I will let you know if I find any.

What version of Linux am I running?

c@c-H97N ~ $ uname -a

Linux c-H97N 4.4.0-53-generic #74-Ubuntu SMP Fri Dec 2 15:59:10 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

c@c-H97N ~ $ uname -r

4.4.0-53-generic

c@c-H97N ~ $ lsb_release -a

No LSB modules are available.

Distributor ID: LinuxMint

Description: Linux Mint 18.1 Serena

Release: 18.1

Codename: serena

c@c-H97N ~ $

This question keeps popping up, and while the last time I went down this road I was trying to find out whether I had the 32 or 64-bit version of the operating system, now I need to know the version-version. I only installed this thing a week or two ago, you'd think I'd remember, and I think I do, but do I really? With computers, thinking that you know something is often the prelude to a long, tedious, wild goose chase through a swamp filled with aligators. Better to find out for sure before you start hunting in the past for something that hasn't happened yet.

There are two commands in the above terminal session:

• uname
• lsb_release

The -a suffix I believe means all. You will notice that the -r suffix on the uname command returns a subset of what it returned with the -a suffix. There are probably other suffixes that can tell you all kinds of things, like what brand of undies your grandma wore, but we have enough for now, so we'll move on.

Reconstructing the terminal session so it was actual text (instead of a fuzzy screenshot) took some fiddling. I finally figured out that using the div tag instead of span would fill out the lines all the way across the page and make the black block contiguous.

Start by pasting the text from the terminal session. Highlight the first line and set the font, text color and background color. Now go into html mode, change the span tag to div.  Move the closing div tag to the end of the block of text, and presto, the whole block has white text on a black background.

Now you can highlight the prompt (c@c-H97N ~ $) and change the color(s) there.

Let's Make Boxes

Michigan Mike reports on commercial printing:

Lots of progress has been made in printing. Large highspeed inkjets are now (or will soon be) ruling the industry, in sheet, web and paperboard (packaging).

What is lagging is the "finishing" automation, specifically 'diecutting", which punches out a specially shaped piece of paper. Envelopes, cardboard boxes, labels, anything that might have curved outline section to it. All straight cuts can be accomplished by a standard guillotine cutter.

It is impossible to get away from making dies to accomplish this curved cutting. [Demand on the Rise for Sheet-Fed Rotary Diecutting]

YouTube digital  die cutters and you will find many that work like "Cricut" cutting plotters.

We always have to have  a die made for our diecutting press, at $100+ a pop and a week leadtime.

Basically a die is a flat plywood board with groove routed into it and a ribbon of edge sharp flexible steel in manually fitted into the groove. Foam rubber blocks next to the steel cutter eject the paper when it has been stamped.

This is a modern rotary die cutter.

The way dies are made for it are:

"The steel plates are manufactured with the desired image "burned" into the plate and then chemically etched to where the remaining cutting blades/knives are left above the surface of the plate and then CNC-sharpened as a final step."

Crazy amount of work or expense of equipment.

There has to be a better way, or at least a hybrid between the rotary and flatbed.

The amount of pressure that can be exerted by a roller is far greater than can be exterted over a whole flat plate.

You don't need to ask me twice to YouTube something. I found a couple. First we need to print our logo on the cardboard.

HP Indigo 20000 Animation
This is the HP Indigo 20000. It prints on paper. You want to print on cardboard, you use the Indigo 30000. They look roughly the same and use the same technology.

Then you want to cut the cardboard so it can be easily folded into a box.


Ward Rotary Diecutter
Or you can do it all in one step like this guy.


Chain feeding printing slotting rotary die cutting machine for corrugated cardboard
There are digital cutters, but they are a bit slower.


Labelmaster: The fastest die-cutting experience Labels & Labeling
Update July 2017 replaced video of Ward Rotary Diecutter.

Update January 2024 replaced video of digital cutter

Font

I changed the default font on this blog today. Times-Roman is okay for paper, but serif fonts don't do read so easily on the screen. Only question I have is why I waited so long to make this change. The title doesn't look as nice, but that may be just because I am used to the way it has looked for so long. We shall see how this all pans out.

Tabs Versus Spaces

Facit typewriter tab stop rack

I've been writing more C language computer code recently, so I'm looking for a place to post it on the net. It would be nice to be getting paid for writing code, but like Mick says, we can't always get what we want. Since I'm only doing this for fun, I thought I should post it somewhere for people to see. Might prove useful, or possibly entertaining, which is probably more valuable these days.
     Wherever I post it needs to display it in a readable format, which means a fixed pitch font (no Times-Roman). Color coding would be nice, too. And we need to be able to do this without having to go through a bunch of contortions.
     Google Drive now seems to support C source files, and it seems to presume tabs are set to every 4 spaces. But it doesn't do color coding, at least not on Firefox and Linux (does it do color coding on my Chromebook? Maybe. The thumbnails appear to have color coding, but when I look at the file itself, no. Weird, man).
     Github does color coding, but it presumes tabs are set every 8 spaces, which every true believer knows is wrong (if you don't believe tabs should be set to every 4 spaces you are obviously a heretic and should probably be burned at the stake. Or maybe we'll just burn your coffee).
    Anyway, I'm experimenting using my Nicomedes program to start with. I used the Linux program expand to replace the tab characters with the appropriate number of spaces and pasted the resulting copy into Github. You should be able to see the file here.

Does anyone else remember when tabs used to be arbitrary? Back in the good old days, back when we had typewriters, tabs were set individually. There was no automatic every-so-many-spaces tab setting. If you wanted a tab at the 4th position, you spaced over 4 spaces and pressed the tab set key. If you wanted a tab at the 47 position, you spaced over 43 more spaces and pressed the tab set key. Now the first time you press the tab key you go to column 4, and the second time you press it you go all the way to column 47, which means the carriage picks up some speed on the way and arrives with a typewriter shaking thump. Which is how God intended for you to arrive at column 47.

Algonquin Round Table

At the table, clockwise from left as seen from above: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman & Robert Sherwood.  In back, left to right are: Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield, and Frank Case.

LeeAnn mentions Dorothy Parker and being as I'm not dead yet, I wondered who the heck is that? I've heard of a number of Parkers over the years. There's Peter Parker (Spiderman) and Bonnie Parker, late mistress of the departed Clyde Barrow, and let's not forget Parker pens. But who's Dorothy? She was a wiseacre, gadfly, writer and all around trouble maker. Got herself blacklisted by that blacklisty guy back in the 50's. Not surprising since she hung out with a bunch of like minded folks.

Small sample of her writing. A complete story in six paragraphs:

"Yeah," he said.  "I must have been dandy.  Is everybody sore at me?"

"Good heavens, no," she said.  "Everyone thought you were terribly funny.  Of course, Jim Pierson was a little stuffy, there for a minute at dinner.  But people sort of held him back in his chair, and got him calmed down.  I don’t think anybody at the other tables noticed at all.  Hardly anybody."

"He was going to sock me?" he said.  "Oh, Lord.  What did I do to him?"

"Why, you didn’t do a thing," she said.  "You were perfectly fine.  But you know how silly Jim gets when he thinks anybody is making too much fuss over Elinor."

"Was I making a pass at Elinor?" he said.  "Did I do that?"

"Of course you didn’t," she said.  "You were only fooling, that’s all.  She thought you were awfully amusing.  She was having a marvelous time.  She only got a little tiny bit annoyed just once, when you poured the clam juice down her back."

Stolen from FWRICTION

Goodreads has some pithy quotes.

The 'Algonquin Round Table' met at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan for lunch daily all during the 1920's. The number of people who showed up varied from just a few to a couple of dozen. Dorothy was one of the mainstays.

P.S. Typography note: Spellchecker didn't like the 'didn’t-s' in the story. Seems a true apostrophe doesn't sit well. Of course there's a risk that it will show up as tofu on your screen. Tofu, that's one of those technical terms for the little boxes that show up when your browser doesn't know what font to use. Sometimes they are rendered as Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Blackphone

Stu is talking about how happy German Chancellor - Dr. Angela Merkel is with the USA and the NSA's behavior. John (UK) leaves a comment with a link to Blackphone. Ooooo! Cool! A black phone! It will go great with my Black AMEX Card and my black Ninja Assassin outfit! I gotta get one! So I pull up the link and this is what I see.

Can you read that? I can't. Well, I suppose I could if I worked at it. I don't know if it's my antique display device or their poor font choice or some combination thereof, but it's really bad. It's even worse than Google's anti-machine font. 
    I copied and pasted it here so you and I can read it.

The Vision

Giving power back to the user

Blackphone is the world's first smartphone which prioritizes the user's privacy and control, without any hooks to carriers or vendors. It comes preinstalled with all the tools you need to move throughout the world, conduct business, and stay in touch, while shielding you from prying eyes.
It's the trustworthy precaution any connected worker should take, whether you're talking to your family or exchanging notes on your latest merger & acquisition.

I will venture no opinion on whether their phone will work as advertised or not, but I will say that if you don't want the feds listening to your conversations, the simplest solution is to not make any phone calls. 

P.S. the .ch extension on Blackphone's URL tells me they are in Switzerland, or at least they want us to think they have some connection with Switzerland, like maybe they like chocolate, or cows, or old Clint Eastwood movies.

A Guardian guide to your metadata

Detroit Steve sent me a link this morning. When I open it I see this:

The apparent random distribution of boldface characters makes me think that something funny is going on. Perhaps they are trying to fool OCR (Optical Character Recognition), ala Google, or maybe they have embedded hidden message in this block of text. But no, increase the font size by pressing Ctrl-+ and all the random boldness disappears. The strange appearance was just an artifact of the font size combined with the screen resolution.

Math Problem

Found on Dan Carlin.com. Let me know when you've worked it out.

Update: Yea gods! Four hours later and the answer miraculously appears! It's one. I thought each of the symbols was supposed to be a number, and some weird font thing had got them scrambled, but now I see that only the three symbols in the center of middle row are meaningful and the rest are just garbage. So the problem is 4 - 3.

Font = Fount ?

Is it "the font of all wisdom", or "the fount of all wisdom"? Either one sounds correct. This question occurred to me the other day, and not having a reference handy, I made a note. Turns out that if you are talking about the source of all wisdom, either one is correct, but if you are talking about what typeface is being used, font is the one you want. The typeface of all wisdom? Would this be the character set that God used to inscribe the ten commandants on the stone tablets for Moses? We may never know what that looked like, and I think that would be a pretty elitist attitude for a font. Personally, I like Times-Roman, which is what I think I am seeing on the screen right now, although who knows? It could be some variation.

Update January 2017 replaced missing image.