We know you all love a design-based history lesson, and this week we’re looking at digital letter spacing and how we ended up where we are today!
It’s easy to forget how recent all the technology we’re so familiar with actually is, and how tonnes of conventions from our everyday interactions with tech are still rooted in mechanical things.
We feel, as people who work with type every day, that understanding these important legacies (and the development of type technology) not only better grounds our current design work but helps best inform new things going ahead. And bonus, its giving you some fun facts to tell your design friends about so you look v v smart.
With the introduction of the standard mechanical typewriter came new parameters for what typography had to accommodate. Every character, from a narrow “i” to a wide “W,” occupied the exact same width on the page. This was a practical necessity of the design – typewriters moved the paper along by a fixed increment for each keystroke, as it was mechanically far easier to move the carriage in uniform steps than to tailor spacing to individual letters.
Standard typewriter pitches (which is the number of glyphs in one inch), like Pica (ten characters per inch) and Elite (twelve per inch), are examples of this one-size-fits-all spacing. This monospacing had a noticeable effect on type design of the era. Every glyph had to be stretched or squeezed to fill an equal horizontal space. Wide letters such as “M” and “W” became slightly pinched, while thin characters like “i” or “l” were often given extra serifs or extended tails to take up more room.
As a result, typewritten documents also developed their own spacing conventions. Because every character was the same width, the space character was relatively narrow—so narrow that typists were taught to insert two spaces after a period to clearly separate sentences! This double-space habit originated on typewriters and became standard in mid-20th-century typing manuals.
Similarly, lacking dedicated typographic symbols, typists improvised with what the keyboard offered: for example, a pair of hyphens -- stood in for a long dash, and straight "prime" marks were used instead of proper quotation marks. These mechanical-era workarounds would later carry over into early digital text, leaving an imprint on typographic computer conventions.
Early Digital Typography (and ASCII)!
The influence of the typewriter’s monospaced system extended directly into the computer age. Early computers did not initially have graphical interfaces or variable fonts – they communicated through terminals that were essentially automated typewriters.
These teleprinter-like devices printed input and output on paper (and later, displayed text on screens) in fixed-width character cells. It was a straight adoption of the typewriter’s grid: even the first CRT monitors operated in text mode, addressing the screen as a grid of character “tiles” rather than individual pixels.
Each position on the grid corresponded to one character in a single monospaced font, simplifying hardware and memory usage in those early systems.
Crucially, the early standards for encoding text in computers were shaped by typewriter thinking. Perhaps you recall some of this from our previous type history newsletter on the history of the @??? The ASCII encoding (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), introduced in 1963, was designed to accommodate characters that typewriters or teleprinters could produce.
ASCII included not just letters and numbers but also a set of control characters with names straight out of the typewriter age: “Carriage Return” (ASCII 13) is an example. In a mechanical typewriter, a carriage return physically reset the carriage to the left margin. Computers inherited these terms and functions: even today, different operating systems use CR, LF, or both to mark the end of a line of text.
The fact that we still call the Enter key “return” on some keyboards is a little linguistic fossil from the typewriter era. Fun, hey! Early digital art and layout practices also betray a monospaced heritage. Because text output was uniformly spaced, developers and users found creative ways to leverage the grid. Here we welcome the phenomenon of ASCII art – drawings made up of text characters, which would only work with monospaced fonts; a proportional font would misalign the characters and ruin the image. So whether you love or hate ASCII art, you have the typewriter to thank for it!
Typographic workarounds that stuck
While monospaced typing and printing were convenient for machines, they imposed limitations on typography which caused people to come up with new solutions for writing.Typewriters couldn’t easily italicise, so underlining text by backspacing and overstriking underscores (_) became a workaround. Early computers, especially in plain-text environments, also lacked true italics or boldface, so conventions like surrounding words with asterisks for emphasis or underlining in plain text mimicked the old typewriter habits. Each of these workarounds was essentially a clever use of the monospaced grid to achieve a typographic effect that the technology itself couldn’t handle in a nuanced way.
Evolving digital type
As computing technology advanced, the typographic limitations of monospacing were gradually overcome. The transition from text-only interfaces to graphical user interfaces in the 1980s was a turning point. Early personal computers, such as the IBM PC and Apple II, displayed text in monospaced grids by default. However, the introduction of systems like the Apple Macintosh (1984) and later Microsoft Windows brought proportionally spaced fonts to screens.
For the first time, what-you-see-is-what-you-get word processors could show text in Times or Helvetica with true variable spacing between letters, rather than just in blocky monospaced system fonts. Behind the scenes, this shift required more sophisticated software and hardware. Early word processors like MacWrite and Microsoft Word could leverage the system’s font library, meaning a word could be shown in proportionally spaced italics onscreen and print the same way – a big big leap from the old monochrome, monospaced editing environments.
Printers, too, transitioned from fixed-width daisy wheel machines to laser printers capable of full typesetting, utilising fonts similar to those used in professional publishing. With the advent of proportional fonts came the return (or reinvention) of fine typographic control in the digital realm. Kerning was rarely, if ever, a concern in the monospaced world – you simply couldn’t kern on a typewriter or a text terminal. But digital fonts and page layout software brought kerning back to centre stage. When physical metal type was used, kerning involved physically shaving type blocks; in digital typography, it became as easy as including a kerning table in a font file.
The monospaced legacy of the typewriter hasn’t vanished – it’s instead become a design choice rather than a technical constraint. Many proportional fonts include a tabular figures option: numbers that all share the same width so they align in financial tables. This is essentially a hybrid of proportional and monospaced principles, used for very practical reasons.
We no longer insert double spaces after periods in published work, because proportional fonts don’t require that extra gap (and typographers will politely correct it). Yet, the legacy is still visible to those who know the history: every time you press the Return key (a term born from typewriters) or see a novelty font that mimics typewritten text. You’re, in fact, witnessing the lasting influence of typewriters on digital letterspacing.
