Steve Yelvington on Nostr: I saw a post this morning (which I will never find again, due to lack of effective ...

I saw a post this morning (which I will never find again, due to lack of effective Mastodon search) about the New York Times stripping diacritics (accent marks) from text that included Vietnamese names and words whose meaning changes without those marks.

So I thought a fhort thread might be useful to describe how we got to this place.

It's technology, not anti-Asian bigotry, in case you're tempted to think that. Print content management/typesetting is the problem.

Start way back in the early 20th century, when fonts were made of metal and wire service dispatches were sent via telegraph. Hand telegraphy evolved into machine telegraphy, with typewriter-like automation (later called Teletype) pounding out text.

But what if the wire service could set stories in type directly? Without somebody rekeyboarding every story?

Mergenthaler Linotype, the leading maker of machines for setting type for printing, experimented with automated typesetting around 1902. It took nearly two decades for a newspaper publisher -- Frank Gannett (yes, THAT Gannett) to see the economic value and push that idea into operation.

/1

#journalism #tech