This exhibit explores digital typography, and its uses and challenges in a variety of settings, including mathematics and non-Western languages.

Featured materials include scholarship on the history and implementation of digital typography. There are texts on LaTeX, a software system for typesetting documents with mathematical notation developed by Donald Knuth, a famous computer scientist who you can sometimes see riding around Stanford on his bicycle. There is also a book on the history of digital input systems for the Chinese language written by Stanford professor Thomas Mullaney. Additionally, there are flyers from Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media (SILICON), codirected by Prof. Mullaney, showcasing SILICON's work developing typefaces for digitally disadvantaged languages. The juxtaposition of these different lenses through which to view digital typography makes for an interesting and wholistic view of the topic.

This exhibit dovetails with other happenings at the Stanford Libraries. In particular, there will be workshops on LaTeX in the Li & Ma Science library in late October, one covering the fundamentals and another covering bibliographies and integration with reference management software. Also, the East Asia Library has recently acquired the only prototype of the MingKwai Chinese typewriter, which prefigured modern digital Chinese input methods.