Type setting, a phrase that has at least two meaning. First, to set a type, or a category. Second, the specifics of setting type to display medium. Both come heavily into play when I think of set theory. For example, categorizing organisms into sets like “Animals” and further subsets such as “Dogs”. Or for our other meaning we can “set the type of the type setting”, such as what it will be printed or displayed on and the characteristics of types of things like margins, line spacing and font.

My favorite type of type setting is cell block type setting. The way I define it is as definitions of characters that are infinitely scalable as they are based on vectors and ratios, or a geometric description. For example capital “A” joins two lines from the bottom of the cell at the midpoint of the top of the cell. Then a horizontal line segment is drawn between the two line segments at a height of your choosing defined by the ratio of the segments height over it’s distance from the top of the cell. That is a cell blocked capital A, which means however you modify the dimensions of the cell you also modify the character that we have just described geometrically, allowing infinite scaling, stretching, and compacting.

Now that we’ve covered cell block characters we’ll go into monospace fonts, or as I will call them, cell block fonts. A cell block font is a collection of cell block characters for a given set of characters. Now, in English, the characters of the alphabet are often represented with varying proportions in a font, rather than rows and columns of uniform cells containing characters. That method of printing or displaying is known as “proportional”. While all characters within the mixed set are cell block characters, albeit described in different sized cells, they are not a cell block font. This is due to the aforementioned variances cell size. With a cell block font (for you computer types, a “console” font) you can print or display any character in a uniform grid of evenly sized cells. Examples would be fonts like Consolas or any font with the “Mono” suffix.

With a cellblock font to draw from you can pull any combination of the font’s characters into a neat grid. You are the warden of an alphabet prison, placing characters in cells creating cliques known as words and gangs known as sentences. Of course these prisons can contain multiple character sets pulled from multiple fonts. For example, a standard English font would contain all lower and uppercase letters from the English alphabet “a-Z”, as well as the Arabic numerals “0-9” and any other characters such as “#” or “&”. You can see in your neat grid of cells the interaction of the symbols forming language, mathematics, or even images.

You typing up anything is a miracle of human thought. Characters represent the spoken word via agreed upon spelling. Now I think calling the order of characters used to represent a word “spelling” is an interesting choice. After all when we “spell” we consciously manifest a symbolic representation of our thoughts. It is an extremely powerful form of sigil magick, since you are able to draw from a common collection of character “sigils” to evoke thoughts in the beholder. Furthermore you are drawing “Characters” from defined sets. These defined “casts” of characters are known to behave certain ways given the context they are in. When you write a letter, formed of letters, your recipient is a character represented in characters.

All language can be represented using a series of characters, which are themselves just shapes defined by (usually) simple vector formulae. Because of this, designing a font is a great accomplishment as you get to define the appearance of characters that will be used again and again for different things. If a font is popular one can see it all over the place as meta style guides for our language sigils.

TL;DR: Words are magick in that they manifest intent into the world. Spelling allows you to cast commonly known “spells” or words. When you type something you select from a font (endless fountain) of predefined characters, putting them into cells. If these cells are all uniformly defined then it is a monospace or, or cell blocked. This can allow some interesting studies of sequencing, more on that later.