Idle question: in the days before TeX, when manuscripts like this were hammered out on Remington office typewriters, how did authors handle symbols?

In this manuscript for example you can see that power superscripts are really just regular numbers typed at an offset (perhaps rotating the paper around the platen one notch instead of the two that would be a whole line feed). But what about the vectors and the giant sigma? All hand drawn over the top of a typed manuscript?

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jasperry 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, I believe they're drawn or stenciled in. Some amount of care has been taken here to produce a more professional-looking result, but you can find plenty of old typed papers where math is obviously handwritten in. Like John Nash's thesis: https://library.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf6021/files...

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jensgk 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

After the Remington era, I once used this :-) IBM Selectric typewriter math fonts, I found this description: https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/texas/apple...

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defrost 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> how did authors handle symbols?

Mostly they didn't .. it was handballed to the secretaries of the math and physics typing pool who used stencils, high end typewriters, and other template mechanisms.

A good many such secretaries were reasonably talented math and physics graduates themselves who had limited opportunity to be hired to do "a man's work".

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mr_mitm 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

When I was a grad student at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Heidelberg in 2014, they still had a few of these secretaries who would type out handwritten manuscripts by professors who couldn't or wouldn't write LaTeX. Maybe they still do.

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jahewson 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Non-secretary women were not in short supply at NASA at this time though. The work of Virginia E. Morrell and Bonnie J. McBride a few years earlier, at this same research center springs to mind.

	▲	defrost 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There were some to be sure .. I wouldn't imply otherwise, none the less many existed that were not hired and most STEM heavy companies and institutions were very male biased. (With the few and obvious exceptions such as Dame Vera Stephanie "Steve" Shirley's ventures) FWiW I learnt a wee bit from Cheryl Praeger, Cathleen Morawetz, Robyn Owens, et al.

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tiu 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Godement in his analysis exposition briefly talks about this, it was all hand drawn.

	▲	fuzzfactor 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		These look like the fonts from the IBM Selectric with the changeable typeballs. When you needed a greek letter you had to stop there, change typeballs, type the greek letter, then put the regular typeball back on. On the equations the big stuff would be drawn in by hand from stencils. On a diagram it could be a mechanical (assisted) drawing that was labeled by typing the same font size, like sketch (a). When you get to sketch (b) though, this one is a reduced photocopy of the original page that was typed on when labeling the mechanical drawing to begin with. You can see the way that all of the equations and illustrations could very well be place-held in the text draft until a perfect equation or diagram could then be added later by cutting the proper size horizontal strip of paper containing the original drawing, and "pasting" it over the blank spot in the text where the figure goes. Before photocopying to arrive at the priceless original like this where you couldn't always tell where it was cut-and-pasted. The Fortran printouts from the IBM line printer look like they could be pasted in both at full-size and photoreduced, on one page at page 20. But a good typist could avoid that for most equations, they could blaze through the text but when an equation came up it took more time to get one equation right than to type many more pages of text. As can be seen, it was obviously worth it :)