Re: "speckling" v "staining " (was New Orleans/glut)

Jack Brubaker wrote:
>
> Chris, Judy, Catherine, et all,
>
> If we are to make real progress in understanding sizes, papers, and gum
> methods it seems we will have to resolve the terms used to describe various
> aberrant results. Clearly writing about it is continuing to be confusing and
> misleading. Remember the quote something like "writing about art is like
> dancing about architecture" (at the moment I can't remember who wrote that).
> We need a visual reference for the terms and conditions we are referring to.
> Does someone have a site where images could be posted from various workers
> where similar effects could be grouped together and given a clear name. I'm
> sorry to be proposing such a thing and not offering to do it myself, but it
> seems the time has come to have a visual tool to refine the discussion and
> move us foreword.

Hi Jack,
As the one person in this discussion who has actually shown visually
exactly what I mean by "speckling" and by "staining" I'm not quite
sure why this admonition is addressed to me. But certainly I agree that
we need visual aids to discussion, and that's partly why I put up my
website, so I could point to various things there to help people
visualize what I'm talking about in discussions here. I'm certainly the
one regular contributor who very often points to a visual example of
what I'm talking about.

I think your idea is good in theory, and I certainly would like to see
what other people besides myself mean by things they describe, but I
find the thought of the idea in practice rather amusing. I mean, who
would get to decide how to group the different examples and what they
should be called? Since we seem to work in parallel universes, it's
hard to imagine that we could come to an agreement on any of that. The
speckling I've seen, I've seen enough times to recognize it and know
what causes it. From the discussion, it sounds like the speckling Judy
and Chris are talking about are different from mine and from each
other. It almost seems like each of us would have a completely different
set of speckles, with different perceived causes, none recognizable by
any of the others. But perhaps this would be useful in creating a
taxonomy of speckles, which beginning printers could compare their
speckles to and follow the recommendations of the person who provided
that particular speckling example. But I'm not sure it would achieve the
stated purpose of coming to some agreement on basic terms.
Katharine
Received on Tue Sep 6 10:06:58 2005