Skip to content

Comment on 800 Years of English Handwriting

Comments

The handwriting in the early 1100s is known as Carolingian Miniscule. It was easy to write, very legible and ideal for writing Latin.

It was not very legible. Its legibility is weak due to aspects such as:

* Non decomposability into rectangles bounding letters

* Variation in letter forms depending on preceding and succeeding letters

* "extended serifs" or edges of letters which may vary at the author's pleasure.

* Some pen strokes being extremely thin to the point of near-invisibility (like the middle line of 'e' characters)

* non-uniform vertical height of letters (even ignoring ascenders)

* non-uniform horizontal baseline

I interpret that sentence to mean "when compared to predecessors".

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.