type
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type
type, for printing, was invented in China (c.1040), using woodblocks. Related devices, such as seals and stamps for making impressions in clay, had been used in ancient times in Babylon and elsewhere. Movable type made from metal molds was developed in Korea as early as the beginning of the 13th cent. However, there is no evidence that the European invention of movable type attributed to Johann Gutenberg was influenced by Eastern developments. The first dated printing from movable type in Europe is a papal indulgence, printed at Mainz in 1454. The first dated book printed from movable type was a psalter printed by Fust and Schöffer on the Gutenberg press at Mainz in 1457. Gutenberg's Mazarin Bible, completed at Mainz not later than 1455, is believed to be the first book printed in Europe from movable type. The type used in these beginnings of European printing was of the kind known as black letter or Gothic, represented now by such types as Old English and German. The forms of the letters were derived from popular handwriting styles.
Other styles suggested the letter forms of roman and italic type. Roman type was used by several printers before Nicolas Jenson so improved it as to ensure its triumph as the standard type. Italic type was first used by Aldus Manutius, who also introduced small capitals. Roman type is of two basic sorts, old style and modern. The modern type emphasizes the contrast between light and heavy lines and has conspicuous level serifs; the old style type keeps its lines of nearly the same weight and has inconspicuous serifs, some of them sloping. Qualities of old style and modern types are often combined. Into the mid-20th cent. type characters were usually made by pouring metal into previously cut matrices and, less frequently, by processes using plastics and other synthetic materials. Computerization of type design and photomechanical printing techniques have almost entirely replaced metal type. By the early years of the 21st cent. the computer had made the design of new styles of type, once an arduous task, a relatively simple process. Tens of thousands of type fonts are now in existence, and new styles of type are created on a nearly daily basis.
Famous designers of types include, in addition to those named above, Geofroy Tory, Claude Garamond, Robert Granjon, Christopher van Dyck, William Caslon, John Baskerville, Giambattista Bodoni, François Ambroise Didot, William Morris, Bruce Rogers, F. W. Goudy, and the contemporary American Matthew Carter.
See also typography.
Bibliography
See F. W. Goudy, Alphabet and Elements of Lettering (repr. 1922); H. Lehmann-Haupt, One Hundred Books about Bookmaking (1949); J. R. Biggs, An Approach to Type (2d ed. 1962); S. Carter, Twentieth-century Type Designers (1987); A. S. Lawson with D. Agner, Printing Types (rev. and expanded ed. 1990); W. P. Jaspert et al., Encyclopaedia of Type Faces (5th ed. 2001); D. B. Updike, Printing Types (4th ed. 2001); P. Baines and A. Haslam, Type and Typography (2002); M. Bierut, Seventy-nine Essays on Design (2007); J. Tholenaar and A. W. Purvis, Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles (2009). See also bibliography under typography.
type
any abstract or conceptual class or category which may or may not be seen as capable of straightforward empirical reference. Compare IDEAL TYPE. See also TYPOLOGY, TYPIFICATION.Type
a rectangular piece of metal, plastic, or wood with a raised image of a letter or character on one side. The raised or recessed image serves to reproduce letters and characters by printing, in which the face is covered with ink and an impression is made on paper. Metal type is the most common; it is cast from printing alloy. The parts of a piece of type (see Figure 1) are the body (a), beard (b), and face (c); the dimensions of the type are defined by the point size (d), width (e), and height to paper (f). The last dimension is constant for all kinds of type.
Type
an element with which a particular taxon is always associated. The type of a species or an intraspecific taxon is usually a single specimen of a plant or animal or, less commonly, several specimens viewed together on one herbarium sheet or in one laboratory preparation. Sometimes a drawing serves as a type. The type of the plant species Companula aldanensis is a specimen collected by the Russian botanist V. S. Korzhevin on Aug. 6, 1928, on the bank of the Aldan River in Siberia; the specimen is preserved in Leningrad at the herbarium of the V. L. Komarov Botanical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
The term “type” is also used as a designation for a lower taxonomic category that is selected as a standard of reference for a higher category. The type of a genus or of a taxon between a genus or species (for example, a subgenus or section) is a particular species. For example, the species Campanula latifolia is the type of the genus Campanula. The type of family or of a taxon between a family and a genus (for example, a tribe or subfamily) is a particular genus. For example, the type genus of the family Campanulaceae is Campanula, a genus established by C. Linnaeus. Taxa higher than a family do not have types.
M. E. KIRPICHNIKOV
type
[′tīp]type
ii. In relation to the certification of aircraft, aircraft engines, or propellers, it means those aircraft, aircraft engines, or propellers that are similar in design.
type
type
(theory, programming)Types supported by most programming languages include integers (usually limited to some range so they will fit in one word of storage), Booleans, floating point numbers, and characters. Strings are also common, and are represented as lists of characters in some languages.
If s and t are types, then so is s -> t, the type of functions from s to t; that is, give them a term of type s, functions of type s -> t will return a term of type t.
Some types are primitive - built-in to the language, with no visible internal structure - e.g. Boolean; others are composite - constructed from one or more other types (of either kind) - e.g. lists, arrays, structures, unions. Object-oriented programming extends this with classes which encapsulate both the structure of a type and the operations that can be performed on it.
Some languages provide strong typing, others allow implicit type conversion and/or explicit type conversion.
type
(1) A category of data. See data type.(2) To press the keys on a keyboard.
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| Try Typing on These Keys! |
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| This "portable" typewriter was created by George Blickensderfer in 1893. (Equipment courtesy of Dorothy Hearn.) |
(3) An internal DOS/Windows command that displays the contents of text and batch files as in the following examples:
type abc.txt entire contents type abc.txt | more per screenful
The vertical bar is a "pipe" and MORE is a "filter." A pipe passes output from one function to another. Thus, you are piping the output of the Type command to the MORE filter, which pauses after receiving a screenful of data and waits for a key to be pressed. See filters and pipes.
Weird Characters on Screen?
The Type command is for viewing .TXT, .BAT and .CMD files that are regular text. If you use Type with an .EXE, .SYS or other binary file, a strange combination of characters will be displayed along with beeps and erratic motion (see below). Binary files coincidentally trigger sounds and screen functions because their formats randomly match the first 32 characters in the ASCII table, which are control codes (see ASCII chart). See binary file.
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| Using Type on a Binary File |
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| If the Type command is used to display a non-text file, these are the results. |