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Fellshardyesterday at 12:10 AM1 replyview on HN

Could it also be an artifact of using scrolls, and needing to sharply delimit 'pages' of text?


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rhet0ricayesterday at 12:18 AM

No. Both Torah scrolls and ancient Greco-Roman papyrus scrolls are written sideways, in columns of a consistent width. The rollers are held in the hands.

Modern fantasy depictions of vertical scrolls leave an erroneous impression that the book proceeds in a downward direction, in addition to the cliché use of 'see above' to prefer to anything previously in the text. Hypertext media and text editors further support this misunderstanding by applying continuous scrolling to a document. This confusion is quite new, perhaps as recent as the 1980s.

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