lowsocks wrote:I always assumed it was to avoid possible interference with the line above. (Or to avoid having to increase the space between the two lines, which could be unpleasant to the eye.) But I am no expert on typesetting.Cainntear wrote:Printers on mainland Europe eliminated diacritics from capitals because doing so saved them money and time. The Italian printers replaced the diacritics with apostrophes, a habit that survives to this day (eg E' instead of É). My recollection is that the elimination of accented upper-case started in France, but I imagine that there would have been a pushback on the commercial companies seen to be "degrading" the language by doing so.
The way I remember it (from reading about it, not alive at the time!) the reason people dropped accented upper-case was because upper-case letters are all in the minority, and while there was a reasonably high chance of having an accented miniscule in a text, there was often a low enough chance of having accented majuscules in a text that you would very often have none on a page.
However, one of the principles of typefaces is that you have enough characters in the set that you can realistically hope to print anything.
Tangent: the term "lower case" for minuscules and "upper case" for majuscules comes from the fact that movable type typefaces came in a two part box -- it was opened by shifting the top part of the box (the "upper case") further from the operator to provide access to the bottom part of the box (the "lower case").
The upper case deliberately had the less frequently used characters (capitals, punctuation, numbers) because these were statistically less common than miniscule letters, and the principle was that if it was further from the typesetter, it would take them longer to get to it and put it in the press. Miniscule is more common than majuscule, so the miniscules were in the lower case.
So, the French (IIRC) type foundries realised that their typefaces were dead slow to use, because they had to include multiple copies of Û É Ç etc -- even though there were lots of pages that had none of them, there was the possibility that some random page might need four or five És. This meant that the French typefaces have loads of additional characters, making them much more expensive to purchase and much slower to use that English and Dutch ones. The end result was noticeable difference in price between books written in French and books written in English. IIRC, it was the printers that made a decision to switch to the new typefaces with no capitals with diacritics, because it gave their books a competitive advantage over their competitors (lower price).
I think I've talked about this in the past and got shot back with the fact that French has capitals with accents.... yes, now. I don't know when French printers switched conventions, but I'm pretty certain I've seen French books with unaccented capitals... possibly only in my grandmother's collections -- she was a French teacher, but I don't really think it was restricted to her. (In fact, I think it was explicitly stated in my Scottish school that the unaccented capitals were a feature of print, and we had to include capitals in writing. I suspect that reversion to É etc was probably a combination of the advancement of technology reducing the time cost of having the larger set of glyphs and the Académie getting shirty as schoolkids were probably affected by the typing conventions.
Italian E' for example is used almost exclusively, having transferred from a mere printing convention to a feature of writing and typing, right through to today when it's typed on computers that way. If you try using É, you will be corrected to E' because it is has just become *that* common.