God forbid you encounter any difficulty making a license purchase on any of their sites. 24-hour+ replies from off-shore help desks a la Slumdog Millionaire. Pop-ups, animated Clippy in the bottom corner, BUGGY website.
Have you noticed the decrease in ease of use since the VC buyout or am I the only one?
Make the website and its support Easier to Use, please!
/rant
Article: "Why Do We 'Bury the Lede?'"
Dictionary Entry - its first known usage is in 1947, although there is no citation listed here.
One notion is that journalists started altering the spelling to "lede" to help distinguish a newspaper lead from the metal leads used by typesetters to separate lines of type in in newspaper articles. Linotype machines were starting to be phased out in the '70s and '80s in favor of computers, so this theory doesn't hold water (as highlighted in the article shared above).
I checked with the mods, and the feedback I've received is that this is typography related enough to share with all y'all. Anything Linotype related has a pretty minuscule audience!
For those unfamiliar with the Linotype^1, the keyboard on the machine isn't a typical QWERTY keyboard. The letters are arranged in vertical columns by english letter frequency; the first column from top to bottom reads etaoin, the next shrdlu, and so on. It has 90 keys divided into three sections of 30 keys: lowercase letters in the left section, and uppercase letters in the right section. The middle section contained punctuation, spaces, numbers and symbols.
This keyboard is the typographer's dream. Ligatures are first class citizens on the Linotype keyboard, and there are dedicated keys for ๏ฌ, ๏ฌ, ๏ฌ, ๏ฌ and ๏ฌ. There are 4 kinds of spaces: 'spaceband', em, en and thin. And my favourite, the somewhat obscure two dot leader: โฅ
I have a few Linotypes in my garage, and I wanted to find a way to learn the keyboard when I wasn't able to fire up the machine. So, when Apple rolled out custom keyboard support in iOS, I created a virtual version of the keyboard used on a Linotype machine, an app called Ottmar, named for the creator of the Linotype:^2
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ottmar/id1041286185
The app is free, there are no ads or annoying in-app purchases, I just made it for the fun of it,^3 and to maybe help persuade someone to take one of my Linotype machines off of my hands.^4 It even has authentic Linotype sounds and Linotype style key repeat with no delay. The only thing that you can't do is run your fingers down the keys to generate an authentic 'etaoin shdrlu', but I'm working on making that work in a new version.
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Don't know what a Linotype is? Doug Wilson created an awesome documentary on the Linotype. The trailer is a good introduction to what these machines are all about.
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I actually originally released this app in 2015, but Apple made a breaking API change shortly after I released it, and then my developer account expired, so it hasn't been available in a functional form for a number of years. Those issues have finally been resolved,^5 which is why I am announcing it now.
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The interface paradigm gets a bit ridiculous when running on a phone in portrait mode, there just isn't enough room on the screen for 90 keys. The result is that I may have the only scrolling k
