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List:       kde-look
Subject:    Re: Icon experiment.
From:       Dave Leigh <dave.leigh () cratchit ! org>
Date:       2001-03-09 14:30:43
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On Friday 09 March 2001 02:37, Rik Hemsley wrote:

> Oh !! I never realised why there was a pot of glue for 'paste'. This
> seems like an extreme example of locale-centric icon design to me. I'm
> an English speaker (from .uk) and I didn't get it.

Well, actually, the action it represents is a leftover from newspaper layout 
(I was a journalism major in the early 80's and remember this well).  You 
would typeset* your articles into one long column ("galleys"), then literally 
cut them out and glue them to a large laminated layout sheet using rubber 
cement (which came in a bottle with brush, just as depicted in the icon).  
Then the whole thing was photographed and plates for the printing press were 
etched from the negatives.  This was carried into the computer world via 
desktop publishing software (the Macintosh and the GEM OS were favoured for 
this at the time.)

Anyway, whether you call it "glue," "paste," "cement," or something else, the 
*action* is the same.  So long as publishing was done by publishers it made 
perfect sense.

-- Dave

* BTW, what computers usually call "fonts" are really "typefaces."  "Fonts" 
are all of the same size. A "Typeface" is the design of the letters.  10pt 
and 12pt Helvitica are two different fonts having the same typeface.

-- 
We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it.
		-- La Rochefoucauld

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