serif and san-serif

 Serif and sanserif has to do with fonts. Serifs are the little extra footy things. And sanserif means it doesn't have any of those.

This has serifs 

This does not have serifs 

 

There are many styles or variations on serifs. They originally came from hand lettered writing. There is a bunch of lingo that goes with it, and fonts in general. If you work with fonts it means something. 

For most of us, we look at fonts and use ones that are appealing, or give a certain look.

 For thousands of years all writing was done by hand. Some of the people that wrote were called scribes. Paper lasted about 15 years, so things had to be written down over and over. If you were careful paper could last longer.

Several hundred years ago, around the 1500s, the printing press was invented. This allowed people to set up an entire page of text using wooden or metal characters and then printing as many pages as you wanted from that one block of text. So what used to take hours and sometimes have errors, suddenly took one or two seconds and never had any errors. The printing press was still a lot of work but you could print thousands of pages. At some point paper became much easier to produce also. So there was relatively cheap paper and it was relatively easy to print. People started printing pamphlets and newspapers. One of the big things people started printing was Bibles. This was sometimes controversial. Not everyone agreed on the different translations of different Bibles. At times people were killed for their different translations. The Kings and the religious community took this stuff very seriously. The printing press allowed different translations to be printed secretly, and over time it became impossible to control. Today people print whatever they want to.

As time went on printing presses became more and more advanced. And eventually they produced high-speed printing presses that could produce thousands of copies of a newspaper in one night.

The printing press also allowed for the abundant printing of books in general. So authors and writing became much more popular.

The next big advance was the computer. Computers work with ones and zeros, actually they work with plus and minus electrical charges which are then represented as ones and zeros. Humans had to build up sequences of ones and zeros that can be interpreted as letters. Then the letters had to be rendered so that they would show up on a screen or could be printed. Electronic copiers were invented which allowed digital copies of documents to be printed directly onto paper without a printing press. There are several different printing technologies in use at this time. The idea is still the same, get the ink onto the paper.

Another interesting side effect of all this technology and computers is that people read mostly on screens. Many people still read paper books and paper copies, but the vast majority of reading is done on a digital screen. It costs almost nothing and it's easy to delete or just never look at it again if you don't want to.