[adding Joey Hess to CC to refresh my memory on bricktext--see below] At 2025-05-02T20:46:47+0200, Martin Lemaire wrote: > Although Gutenberg had a major impact on printing in the 15th century, > there are traces in Asia of xylogprahy[1] as early as the 6th century. > It is argued that western educations give the guy too much credit. > His contribution to the craft was more about crafting inks allowing the > printing on both side of the sheet.
That could be. As I noted, I'm not a domain expert. But I would be cautious; as bloodily successful as European colonialism and propaganda have been, Europeans did not invent the practice of chauvinism. It seems to arise naturally among humans everywhere. I find the sad story of the Moriori in Polynesia to be a telling example. > Earlier than that – and closer to the practice that is printing > characters in a monospaced grid – there has been stoichedon[2], a > style of stone engraving where letters are aligned vertically and > horizontally. Words seem to be separated by a spaceless sign between > them. I assume this absence of spaces produced the most uniform and > pleasing grayness. First I've heard of this--neat! > To my knowledge, we have to wait for the year 2000 for someone called > rs1n to produce a perfectly justified monospaced document[3] without > adding or removing between-word space, writing and typesetting at the > same time. Hmmm. [from the linked site] >>> 03. What program did you use to justify the text? >>> None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on >>> the right hand side. Everything was done with an ASCII editor. I know this concept by the name "bricktext"; a guy named Jim Warner has been practicing it in Git commit messages for the procps project[A] since at least 2012, but if I remember correctly he was doing it in his emails many years before that. I learned of the phenomenon from Joey Hess on the Debian mailing lists over 20 years ago. Joey, do you recall more details? Was Jim the person you had in mind back then? Can someone claim priority in the 1990s? (Or earlier? It wouldn't surprise me if Martin Gardner had an article about it in 1959.) > How does *roff monospace justification algorithm relate to its sibling > justifying proportional letters ? Are the two vaguely related or it's > another approach ? They're closely related. The only difference is that the horizontal motion quantum on a typewriter/nroff device is much coarser with respect to the glyph pitch (width) than on typesetters. The relevant function fits on one screen, if your terminal window is at least 36 lines high. :) (Much of it is given over to comments.) https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/src/roff/troff/env.cpp?id=d96a9c58bbe296b065fa250e3ea1e1a410cdde81#n2185 > [3] Super Metroid – FAQ/Speed Guide, rs1n, 2000 > https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs/10114 > mirrored here https://www.martinlemaire.fr/metroid.html I'm not much of a video gamer--few attract my attention and fewer still hold it--but Super Metroid was indeed a gem. Regards, Branden [A] https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps
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