Meaning Behind Ink Colors, Way Back When?

[Bibliophage]

Orange I use myself, sparingly; I'm half Irish. But yellow? Who can read it?

 

Sean

Use a broad italic/calligraphy nib - highlighter.

[Astronymus]

Orange I use myself, sparingly; I'm half Irish. But yellow? Who can read it?

 

Sean

I admit it's hard to read... It's better to use it for marking.

[Arkanabar]

<snip>

Visite: You have appeared with the card in person. Turn the upper left corner.

 

Felicitation: You congratulate the recipient. Turn the upper right corner.

 

Conge: Announces you are leaving town. Turn the lower left corner.

 

Condolence: Expresses your sympathy to the recipient. Turn the lower right corner.

 

 

There should be some accents in these french terms, but I always forget how to type them.

 

 

In Windows 10, hit the Windows menu key and type "Character Map", an app that lets you select, copy, and paste different characters Linux users with GNOME can use GuCharMap (I think it's called CharacterMap in Ubuntu Unity), and those with KDE can use KCharSelect. OSX includes "Character Palette" but I have no idea how to access or use it.

Edited February 9, 2020 by Arkanabar

[Anderglan]

IIRC, until at least the 19th century it was common in many German speaking countries and their governments that each hierarchical tier had their own ink colour, and this does indeed to an extent correlate with the seal wax colours:

red -- "superiors" of an office

green -- just the headmaster/"director" of an office

violet -- the superior of all the directors, usually a permanent secretary (deputy minister, minister)

[JulieParadise]

IIRC, until at least the 19th century it was common in many German speaking countries and their governments that each hierarchical tier had their own ink colour, and this does indeed to an extent correlate with the seal wax colours:

 

red -- "superiors" of an office

 

green -- just the headmaster/"director" of an office

 

violet -- the superior of all the directors, usually a permanent secretary (deputy minister, minister)

 

Yeah, it is still that way. I do not know whether these colours are universal to different administrative units but all in all this kind of system is used still. In the German forum PenExchange people working within such hierarchies sometimes let expressions slip like "oh, I am not/only allowed to use red/green/violet ink in my office".

Edited February 9, 2020 by JulieParadise

[scratchofapen]

Well in some bureaucracies green was the color of the revision, and i remember older -yet retired- people saying that in some companys they worked for green was restricted only for the owner/leader of the company

[DilettanteG]

 

In Windows 10, hit the Windows menu key and type "Character Map", an app that lets you select, copy, and paste different characters Linux users with GNOME can use GuCharMap (I think it's called CharacterMap in Ubuntu Unity), and those with KDE can use KCharSelect. OSX includes "Character Palette" but I have no idea how to access or use it.

 

Thanks but, of course, I have Mac OS X . I could Google it, but I think I'm past the edit window.