Someone asked a group of Old English specialists how they handled the character thorn (þ) and eth (ð) in the days before Unicode (and before computers).
The answers included:
- Switch Selectric ball
- Changed typewriter key
- Overtype “p” and “b” together
- Overtype o, then x to the upper right for edh
- Handwrote into blank in typed text
- European typewriter
- modified Epson dot matrix
All of this brings me back the days whem my mother said not to worry if the typewriter had no “1” key – you just used lowercase L instead. Boy was I excited by my first Mac dot matrix printer!
It reminds me that a lot of these accented characters developed in the manuscript era. Not only wasn’t Unicode not an issue, but neither was typesetting. Writing these isn’t nearly as inconvenient as typing them.
BTW – Just for kicks, I thought would recreate the overstruck p+b = þ and o+x = ð in an image file in multiple fonts. Verdana is a surprisingly flexible font for this.
