I was planning on casting the Monotype ribbon I brought home from Monotype University 8 last August, but I just noticed today that the ribbon is punched for 9½-set and I don’t have an S5 wedge for this size. All I have is the wedge for 10-set (and fractions larger).
I can use the 10-set wedge with this ribbon, but the lines will come out with the justification all wrong because the variable space width is specified in the ribbon punches based on the set size being 9½ points. So I will have to baby-sit the machine, with the galley set overly wide (to accommodate the lines that will be about 5% longer than planned), the wrong-line-length trip disabled, and dropping in leads between each line.
There are only about 8 lines of actual text (not counting warm-up lines and such) so this would not be too burdensome.
I have also figured out how I can manually read the justification punches in the ribbon, convert the value to inches, scale it by 20/19 (10/9½), and convert back to punch codes. Then I can paste over the existing justification punches and manually punch new ones, thus giving a ribbon made for 10-set and a line 20/19 times longer than the original line length. Once again this is only feasible because there are so few lines. I had originally thought that to correct the justification punches I would have to count all the unit widths of all the characters in each line. The latter method might be a bit more accurate since it would not suffer from double rounding during the calculations, but that isn’t really worth the trouble.
So for now I’m continuing to plod on, with the next job being to disassemble and clean my 10-point composition mould.
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