Roadie's Ramblings - from a high-tech old fart

The_Roadie

Original poster
Lifetime VIP Donor
Member
Nov 19, 2011
9,957
Portland, OR
I'm exceedingly guilty and starting to get called out on OT posts and hijacking in many other threads. But it's my nature to ramble on from a few thousand years of interesting (to me at least) experiences that I'm compelled to pass on like a typical Dad figure.

So I'm going to move those sorts of things here. Follow the topic if you wish - no need to clutter up the thread with single word posts just to make sure you get notified when I commit another post here.

Appreciated.

garfieldmicehonor.jpg


First one moved from the Site Support Bug thread:


IllogicTC said:
You mean align left. Justify is where the words and letters are spaced to always fill the maximum space per line. :rotfl:

I'm pedantic sometimes, don't mind me.
Been thinking about this for a while. *I'm* insufferably pedantic most of the time as well. Been into typography since junior high, when the local newspaper (owned by my Dad's good friend) had a Linotype machine and generated hot lead slugs and kerning for full justification was done using wedges between the words. First real manuals I produced were using a UNIX editor (vi) and the LaTeX mark-up language to generate Postsript code to drive an early laser printer (1982). It was not in any way WYSIWYG.

Nowadays I use FrameMaker most of the time at work, and the usual editors at home.

You're certainly correct that "Align Left" is the predominant term in the last 20 years. Somehow I was infected with the thought (in some desktop publishing programs) that "full justification" is needed for what could be adequately described as "justification", and those older programs use "left justify" to mean the same thing as "left align". LaTeX uses the environent flushleft and the command \raggedright to deliver what they called "Left Justified Alignment." If you didn't override the defaults, all paragraphs in LaTeX would be fully justified.

Just think of me as the guy in the green eye shade. I suspect there's nobody here who's ever operated a Linotype. But I've been astonished before.
linotype1.jpg
 

IllogicTC

Member
Dec 30, 2013
3,452
The_Roadie said:
Been thinking about this for a while. *I'm* insufferably pedantic most of the time as well. Been into typography since junior high, when the local newspaper (owned by my Dad's good friend) had a Linotype machine and generated hot lead slugs and kerning for full justification was done using wedges between the words. First real manuals I produced were using a UNIX editor (vi) and the LaTeX mark-up language to generate Postsript code to drive an early laser printer (1982). It was not in any way WYSIWYG.

Nowadays I use FrameMaker most of the time at work, and the usual editors at home.

You're certainly correct that "Align Left" is the predominant term in the last 20 years. Somehow I was infected with the thought (in some desktop publishing programs) that "full justification" is needed for what could be adequately described as "justification", and those older programs use "left justify" to mean the same thing as "left align". LaTeX uses the environent flushleft and the command \raggedright to deliver what they called "Left Justified Alignment." If you didn't override the defaults, all paragraphs in LaTeX would be fully justified.

Just think of me as the guy in the green eye shade. I suspect there's nobody here who's ever operated a Linotype. But I've been astonished before.
attachicon.gif
linotype1.jpg
Nope, but I have run one of these:

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFxH9dmvjk4[/media]

and one of these:

Sturtz%20SE%20VSM%203020%20Quad%20Welder.jpg


And more to the topic at-hand, if you'd like to jump immediately to the last post rather than the first unread post, you can click the timestamp below the name of the last poster in the list. It's a little confusing at first that links don't make themselves apparent but the tooltips help at least.
 

Mark20

Member
Dec 6, 2011
1,630
Only a few thousand years? Me thinks you're underestimating :biggrin: (and here come the warning points).

But I would love to see a Linotype machine in action.
 
  • Like
Reactions: The_Roadie

glfredrick

Member
Jan 14, 2014
172
[SIZE=medium]Oh snap... if we are now talking edits and such I’m in. I've formatted and edited, one character at a time, over one hundred doctoral dissertations that I've also printed for binding on my own equipment (laser printer on cotton bond). I swim in grammatical edits and eat gerunds for breakfast.[/SIZE]
 
  • Like
Reactions: The_Roadie
Mar 24, 2014
276
Bristol PA
Does Working for Minute man press count? Hell i couldnt even tell you what type of press anymore the numbers all blended in.. but I remember how much fun it used to be till the owner (Franchise Business) screwed me outta 1 months pay and closed the doors.
 

IllogicTC

Member
Dec 30, 2013
3,452
Bill05EnvoySLT said:
Does Working for Minute man press count? Hell i couldnt even tell you what type of press anymore the numbers all blended in.. but I remember how much fun it used to be till the owner (Franchise Business) screwed me outta 1 months pay and closed the doors.
I'd say this is shocking, but then I remember how a majority of companies seem to work these days and well... not too shocking lol.

I'd love to have a hand in running a press. It's a pretty extreme example of mechanical timing, and is heavily interesting to me. Pfft, even those big Xerox machines in the office are pretty cool to me, for Pete's sake.
 

jrSS

Member
Dec 4, 2011
3,950
I am a lead pressman and run a 40" Heidelberg offset press. Just thought id throw that out there. Everything is ctp roadie. Film days are over with
 

The_Roadie

Original poster
Lifetime VIP Donor
Member
Nov 19, 2011
9,957
Portland, OR
I got a few rants, but nothing that is postable here.

Worked on a new system proposal that's taken the prospect customer SIX MONTHS to get project approval. Rumor is the PO is imminent, and then I'll have six months of solid design and debug work. Good news is that it's even higher energy physics than my last one, so the device explosions will be EPIC if my circuit fails!
 

HARDTRAILZ

Moderator
Nov 18, 2011
49,665
Just put NSFW in the title and let it fly buddy. Some strong words can help the writer and reader sometimes.
 

Forum Statistics

Threads
23,273
Posts
637,488
Members
18,472
Latest member
MissCrutcher