On Fri, May 02, 2025 at 09:51:04AM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
The practice of adjusting lines of text to be all the same length when
typesetting is an old one. It appears to be the practice in at least
some late-medieval illuminated manuscripts, and images of the pages of
the Gutenberg Bible that I can find online suggest to me that the
practice goes back to the dawn of the printing press.
The practice of adjustment definitely predates printing.
Torah scrolls are written with full justification (see e.g.
https://www.hasoferet.com/scribal-arts/stretching-letters/). The oldest
complete extant example is the Bologna scroll, c. 1155-1225 CE.
https://i.dawn.com/primary/2013/05/51a73964f337b.jpeg shows a couple of
columns of that scroll, and one can see that some letters have been
stretched to better approximate the desired column width. Of the two
fully-visible columns in that image, the right one is a bit of an
exception because most of it is the Song of the Sea which is laid out as
poetry, but for example look at the end (bearing in mind that this is
right-to-left) of the eighth line of the left column. On the
partially-hidden column at the right of the image, you can even see the
vertical rule that the scribe made to mark how wide the column should be
before writing. IME more recently-written scrolls generally do a more
exact job of aligning text to the margins.
I'm not sure exactly when full justification became the practice here,
but at least
https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Tefillin%2C_Mezuzah_and_the_Torah_Scroll.7.4?lang=bi
(c. 1170-1180 CE) seems to indicate that it was preferred at that time.
It's not my field, but I suspect one could also find ancient Qur'an
manuscripts showing similar practices of full justification.
(I don't think this provides any help on the question of when the
particular practice of attempting to achieve uniform greyness in
monospaced text arose, though.)
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
