“Read faster with less eyestrain.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO on Bookerly typeface (2015)Ĭoming back to our question from the beginning, Amazon launched the typeface called Bookerly on their Fire tablet family originally in late 2014. What is Amazon’s Bookerly typeface all about? the dawn of digital typefaces, the printers’ programming language PostScript or the TrueType technology) and over a curvy road, we have today come to using all the different typefaces that we know and love on our computers every day: Times New Roman, Calibri, Liberation Serif, Palatino Linotype or the latest Bookerly font as it is being used on the latest generation of Amazon’s eReaders, the Kindle family. In other words, the technology was finally digital. We would call them pixels from today’s point of view.
On a hardware level, the tube does not function solely as a stencil anymore through which light would be distributed it would rather produce tiny points that are projected in the shape of one selected letter. (Still, kids of the 80s and 90s should remember this…). Rudolf Hell’s Digiset machine projected light rays onto photo paper as phototypesetting did before, but implemented the Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) into the process, the decades-long television standard that was later to be replaced by LCD and Plasma TVs. In the mid 1960s, the first digital printing devices came into existence. If film was used as the carrier of the written word, it could afterwards be used as an offset mould for further reproduction. In this process, instead of using lead type moulds, the very substance of light is projected through a font disc onto light-sensitive photo paper or film and the typed words appear due to a chemical process on the paper – it’s almost like magic. The final step towards digital alternatives to analogue printing techniques was the invention of phototypesetting which originated 1949 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Furthermore, the electrical control under which the type is hammered onto the sheet of paper created a superior image quality which remained to be the status quo for another decade. This new technology made further advancement in the individual typesetting possible: The lightweight daisywheel improved typing speed significantly and made proportional fonts accessible in a personal typewriter for the first time. Without the need of single levers, jamming occurred far less often and the type heads could be swapped to change fonts while writing.Įight years later, Diablo and Xerox printers changed the electric typewriters’ inner components yet again by showcasing the so-called daisywheel that used interchangeable, pre-formed type elements radially arranged around the centre of a disc.
#WHAT HAPPENED TO KINDLE BOOKERLY FONT MANUAL#
Instead of pressing a singular type hammer against the inserted sheet of paper when a key is pressed as manual typewriters did, this electric typewriter made use of a spherical head, nicknamed ‘golf ball’ because of its shape, to rotate the type into the right position and create an imprint of the pressed letter. The next few paragraphs are meant to give a short insight into the technologies paving the way for the digitalisation of analogue printing technologies as they were known and used for such a long time.įirst, the IBM Selectric typewriter changed the way that typewriters produced text from 1961 onwards. This was not only one due to one singular technological revolution that changed the use of typefaces to create texts but rather several inventions around the same time that digitalised the process of typesetting. How did we get to the typefaces that we have got installed on our PCs, laptops, Macbooks and eBook readers, though? This is where a historical delineation might come in handy.Īt the very latest, the 1950s mark the outset of the rise of digital typesetting. One such font would be an italicised 12-point Times New Roman in bold letters. In comparison, the term ‘font’ is traditionally used to talk about a matched set of type with a particular size, weight and style of a typeface, among other features. One example for a commonly known and used typeface is Times New Roman. physical metal blocks to print single letters with ink onto a sheet of paper, velum or similar carrier materials), a type face or typeface denominates the sum of all types belonging to one font family. Talking about typefaces instead of fonts in the first paragraph alludes to a commonly found misconception in the field of information technology and thus needs some further explanation before looking into the history of today’s typefaces.Ĭompared to the original use of punches for printing (i.e. Left: A design of the letter A by the humanist designer and painter Geoffroy Tory following the anatomy of the ideal human proportions Right: Louis Simonneau’s design of the ideal letterform in reference to quasi-scientific coordinates