From boiling lead and black art: The history of mathematical typography (2017)

a day ago

Mathematical typesetting is more an art form than regular text, akin to data visualization.
Pre-digital math typesetting was extremely costly and time-consuming, known as 'penalty copy'.
Gutenberg's movable type and lead alloy revolutionized printing, separating typecasting from typesetting.
The Monotype System introduced a unit system for characters, enabling sophisticated mathematical typesetting.
Phototypesetting in the 1960s replaced hot metal with light and film, vastly increasing speed.
Donald Knuth created TeX in the 1970s to restore the beauty of mathematical typography using digital methods.
LaTeX and pdfTeX further refined TeX, enabling efficient, high-quality math typesetting and direct PDF output.
Modern digital publishing is nearly instantaneous, but the author argues for slowing down to prioritize artistry and thoughtful expression.

Mathup translates simple mathematical expressions into structured MathML.
It supports installation via npm, as a client-side script, or as a command-line tool.
Custom HTML element <math-up> allows embedding math in web pages.

PDF is a successful technology for preserving visual fidelity in documents but was not designed for machine reading.
The format's origins are in PostScript, which focused on printing with geometric precision rather than semantic structure.
PDF gained ubiquity due to its ability to make documents look identical across different systems.

Glyphs 4 introduces pen points for variable strokes that adapt smoothly along a path.
COLRv1 support allows colored shapes, blends, gradients, and live previews.
Visual kerning groups let you drag and drop glyphs to organize kerning instantly.

Dithering reduces file size by using fewer colors while maintaining detail, and gives a cool aesthetic.
The author uses ImageMagick's 'convert' command to simulate AM (amplitude-modulated) printing dots.
The process involves converting to CMYK, separating channels, creating dot grids, rotating them at specific angles, and overlaying.

Typing program listings from magazines required extreme precision, as even a single space error would prevent the program from running.
Debugging in that era was a manual, painstaking process of comparing characters on screen to printed pages, with no online resources like Stack Overflow.
Community existed through letters to editors, with delays of weeks, resembling modern forums but at a slower pace.

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