Vollmann seems amazingly prolific, 'writing by the yard' as one of the editors put it. I've ordered the first volume of The Carbon Ideologies to see what the sentences and paragraphs are like, how it sounds.
PS: Is it really that expensive to licence specific fonts at book publisher scale?
I have only scanned the contents of Part 1 (reading from paper) and read chapter 6 quickly, because that is the only chapter that considers the issue of the layout of the printed material.
My interest in this question is mainly in presenting short paragraphs of text in paper worksheets and handouts for teaching. Teacher training courses tend to echo the 'sans for dyslexics' notion but in addition suggest the use of headings with space before and after and the use of bullet points to break up material, the use of right-ragged (for LTR languages) so that inter-word spacing remains constant, and the use of line spacing chosen so that the space between the lines is a bit longer than the spacing between the words. The choice of typeface is seen as being a bit less important (as long as it is consistent within the handout) given that secondary school children will be familiar with a range of type faces.
Now I'm trying to find some kind of reference for this view about presentation of the page. If anyone has any ideas that would be ace.
In the medium sized public sector organisation I do some work in (not tech), most of the business type systems we use are reached via Chrome and are subscription based. I can log into them all using Linux with Chrome installed from home and there is no difference compared to using an organisation PC in their premises. Yes, I am logging in via Microsoft 365 but very few of the applications apart from email and calendar/Teams are used. The business type systems could well be running on Azure but I suspect not, at least for some of them.
Contrast that with a decade ago. All systems accessed via networked PCs using Windows native clients. I had to use RDP to a desktop to access anything from outside the network.
One day someone is going to realise that the organisation does not have to spend £££ replacing every PC just to keep running a Web browser.
Owen Gingerich was a historian of astronomy who did a census of printed early editions of Copernicus' book De revolutionibus. He found a tradition of students copying annotations from teachers readings into their own copies of the book. I recollect that he was able to trace various traditions of commentary each stemming from a well known astronomy teacher.
I suppose that checking early printings of key works looking for annotations is a pretty standard thing to do now.
There is a lot of coastline and not that many police/coastguards. In fact we have been closing down the coastguard stations since satellite tracking of commercial shipping became the norm.
(I come from a part of the UK that was notorious for smuggling, wrecking and other forms of piracy).
PS: Is it really that expensive to licence specific fonts at book publisher scale?
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