Stretchy letters in print

We talk about stretchy letters in sifrei Torah, now and again (post about said stretchy letters). Here's a post about stretchy letters in print.

You know this icon. In the universal language of word processors it means "right-aligned text." Lines run level down the right side of the page; if a line doesn't fit perfectly, there'll be a little bit of white space at the end of the line, and the left edge of the page will be ragged. This paragraph is left-aligned (and made narrower than the rest of the page, so the justifying will show up better), so the right edge is ragged.

If you don't want a ragged edge, you use this one, the icon for justified text. The word processor does its clever tweaking so that the lines come out nice and straight down each side of the page. This paragraph is justified, so both edges are straight. And made narrow and provided with otherwise superfluous verbiage so that it'll cover more than two lines.

This is accomplished by averaging out the amount of space between each word, so that the words are evenly spaced along the lines. We don't usually notice that the spaces between words are different sizes on each line, unless the variation is noticeably huge. The variation is rather pronounced in the couple of lines to the left, for instance.

This is actually a rather involved process. Computers can do it because they are rather good at sustaining hundreds of calculations per second, and it is easy for them to add or remove bits of space here and there. It is not so easy when you are a compositor using movable type.

So there are tricks printers, and manuscript scribes, use to keep their lines manageable. Abbreviating is one. Too many letters in a line? Knock a few letters off common words, the sort peo. will be able to rea. anywa.

Or initialising - turning common phrases into acronyms. P. G. Wodehouse does this, although probably not for the same reasons - Mix me a b.-and-s., Jeeves - perhaps he had learned rabbinic texts and knew the despair of sentences which end with i.o.u.a.* (And perhaps not.)

Or sometimes they stretch letters. Here's some stretchy letters in movable type - compare the two sizes of hey, especially.

Printers like symmetry in their stretchy letters. You don't see stretched reish in print much, but you see it all the time in sifrei Torah; you don't see stretched final-mem in sifrei Torah much, but you see it in print.

More symmetry - when they stretch lamed, they bring its foot faaar forward and bend its neck right back, so that it's more or less balanced. Scribes don't do this. I think this liking for symmetry has to do with where your eye is drawn - in Ashkenazi Torah scripts the horizontal carries far more weight than the vertical,** so your stretch is mostly concerned with its horizontals; but in print both dimensions are roughly equal, and you want to stretch letters that are going to stay balanced despite that.

Not a definitive list of Letters Stretched In Print by any means - just I went to a shiur (Yeshivat Hadar plug), and the handout was a photocopy from a page typeset in this way, and it caught my eye.

* Brandy-and-soda, and "impossibly obscure unguessable acronyms," of course!

** Bit more about that here.