All the font-mania thanks to Steve Jobs, writes Simon Garfield (ht):
Shortly after he dropped out of college, Mr. Jobs found that he had the freedom to attend classes on subjects that pleased him rather than bored him. At one of these he discovered the joys of calligraphy and typefaces. He found the experience "beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture," as he once said.
And so when the Mac was born a decade later, Mr. Jobs gave its users something novel, a choice of fonts—everything from Times New Roman to the original Chicago and Venice—a revolutionary act that loosened our dependence on the professional designer. (Whether your nice new printer could cope with them was another matter.)
Even as my students explore fonts that I never knew were even possible, it is not that the typewriter has gone away. The LA Times reports (ht) that typewriters and the typing profession are alive and well in India:
India's typewriter culture remains defiantly alive, fighting on bravely against that omnipresent upstart, the computer. (In fact, if India had its own version of "Mad Men," with its perfumed typing pools and swaggering execs, it might not be set in the 1960s but the early 1990s, India's peak typewriter years, when 150,000 machines were sold annually.)
Credit for its lingering presence goes to India's infamous bureaucracy, as enamored as ever of outdated forms (often in triplicate) and useless procedures, documents piled 3 feet high and binders secured by pink string.
Other loyalists include the over-50 generation and, conversely, young people in rural areas who dream of a call-center job but can't yet afford a laptop. There are also certain advantages to a machine without a power cord in a country where 400 million people still lack electricity.
So, when typists in India switch over to computers, will the following happen? (ht to a friend)
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