A project on the art, acts and technologies of writing, editing and publishing
I’m writing this post on a secondhand 科達牌中英文電子四色繪圖打字機 Fortec ET-888 Chinese–English electronic four-colour plotting typewriter I just bought. This was designed in Hong Kong in the 1980s and manufactured in Mainland China. It was never a popular machine, launched right at a point when Chinese computing was at its infancy.
I find that I don’t write the best when I use a fountain pen. Why is that? Is it because the nib is a bit large and I can’t see what I’m writing properly? Is it the ink flow? Is it how the nib interacts with (scratches) the paper surface? Is it because the ink …
Yesterday morning I started a pen journal and wrote 14 entries using 14 different pens that I have. Rarely do I write continuous prose out entirely in longhand, yet ideas and words flowed just as easily as typing on a keyboard. Edited final draft below, illustrated by first drafts and the respective pens discussed. These …
While searching YouTube to find videos of typewriter demos (there are lots) I came across this guy named Joe Van Cleave from Albuquerque, USA who has a whole series of videos of him test-driving numerous manual and electronic typewriters in his collection (216 episodes!). I stumbled upon another series of his called ‘confessions of an …
I learned desktop publishing on my Mac with a bootlegged copy of Aldus PageMaker 3. I’m now writing in version 5.0. In fact before I started on my Mac, I learned the basic concepts of desktop publishing at school on an Acorn Archimedes machine running Impression Style. I believe very few people outside of the …