Week 8: Contents and Containers

­I found this blog question to be quite challenging. Although we discussed examples in class of issues regarding EPUB formats and difficulties in representing certain types of book’s content in its container (its e-reader or tablet), I feel like that there are few obvious analogous situation that instantly come to mind. This is, in part, because these issues often exist under the surface, and periodically surfacing as glitches and errors. Prof. Galey’s example in this week’s blog post question, of HTML code appearing in a printed text, is one such instance.

Without any glaring examples at the surface, I turned to Google for help. After searching a few phrases related to “type”, “font”, “print”, and “error,” my search of “typeface errors in print” brought up a first result that intrigued me: Office 2010 printing errors with Calibri font when printing through a Windows Server 2003 or 2008 print server. This is a problem that I’ve run into a few times at my workplace: when printing in Calibri, now Microsoft Office’s default font for the Windows version, certain characters would be missing.

 

In the missing Calibri characters case, the contents of a Word file cannot be contained on the page when printed. Whitney Anne Trettien discusses the way, in some cases, “textuality [has become] obscured through the process of digitalization” (23).  Although the Calibri case is fixable, it is an example of the reverse: moving towards print obscures the intended physical representation of the digital.

 

Briefly reading over the Microsoft Support page and browsing through a few online support forums and Xerox support materials, I learned that in many cases common fonts reside in a printer’s “memory” in order to facilitate faster printing. In some cases, when a request to print a font that is not a resident-font, it is closely emulated by another font. This reminds me of Trettien’s discussion of the cover of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica in that there is an odd situation of mediated materialities—a cheapness. Whereas English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica moulds together odd stock photo cover with contents of the “e-book” crawled from websites lies Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, the Calibri case also reminisces of imitation.

 

The technical issue that causes Calibri to misprint on certain printers is due to “mismatch of the Calibri font from the application to the server,” according to Xerox. Moreover, this problem does not even allow the printer to imitate a similar font. Although my explanation lacks the exact technical expertise to delve further, I find it quite funny that Microsoft’s new(ish) default (flagship) font (the content) cannot be displayed properly in print (the container) if printer from Word 2010 on an older Windows server. 

References:

Trettien, Whitney Anne. "A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: the Case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica." Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013):http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000150/000150.html.