One of my professors at the Leiden summer school told me something interesting. Historically, many linguistics textbooks and papers have been physically published in Leiden, often featuring ancient or minority writing systems. Before the digital typesetting era, typesetters in Leiden were contractually obligated not to learn any rare writing systems or languages, and to work purely by verifying that the typeset text looked visually identical to the submitted manuscript. This is because when you can read it, you're inevitably going to transcribe what you think you read, not what you actually read, which is a big problem when the entire point is to showcase exactly what ancient people did write and not what we think they should have written

#linguistics #typography #typesetting

One of my professors at the Leiden summer school told me something interesting. Historically, many linguistics textbooks and papers have been physically published in Leiden, often featuring ancient or minority writing systems. Before the digital typesetting era, typesetters in Leiden were contractually obligated not to learn any rare writing systems or languages, and to work purely by verifying that the typeset text looked visually identical to the submitted manuscript. This is because when you can read it, you're inevitably going to transcribe what you think you read, not what you actually read, which is a big problem when the entire point is to showcase exactly what ancient people did write and not what we think they should have written

#linguistics #typography #typesetting