Ketubah drafting part 1 – on 4mm-high letters

Or more, or less.

I don’t really even know why I’m writing about this, except that I spent a little while working it out, and it seems a pity to deprive the internets of my vast wisdom (<= HUMOUR).

So. There’s a category of fountain pen nib called “Broad.” I don’t know what that corresponds to in millimetres or anything…pen nibs have a special set of measurements all of their own. “Broad,” “Broad Broad” (that’s B2), “Broad Broad Broad” (B3)* and so forth. When you get up to about B6 they shift paradigm into C nibs, don’t know what that’s all about, maybe they were worried that more than two digits wouldn’t fit onto a fountain-pen nib, they are pretty small after all.

Anyway, the point is, I find that when I’m writing with a B nib, I like to have a 4mm wide line for the lettering, with 5mm lines between. This is a matter of taste and pragmatics – 4 and 6 is easier to mark up, but that makes the text block too big to fit nicely on 18*24 paper. Of such considerations is art made – being too lazy to think about the nine-times-table (and I have a degree in mathematics you know), and being forced into it regardless because the paper isn’t big enough.

So you get out your portable drafting board that you bought off Craigslist, and your ruler and your set-square, and you mark out 4- and 5-mm lines. How do you know how wide to make the lines, and how many of them to make? That’ll be part 2.

*I did those in bold for the joy of typing<B>B2</B>…

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.