re: #310 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷

The “super narrow figure 9” is actually a different, recognised (though fallen out of use in the USA) for “long s.”

In typesetting, long s is confusing, as it looks like a letter f without the crossbar, or half a crossbar.

That letter is where you get phrases in print from the late XVIII and early XIX Centuries such as “In Congreſs Aſsembled”

I would be curious whether or not colleges in their history departments offer any courses on how to read cursive, since you pretty much need to, along with knowing some of the potential pitfalls, in order to read original documentation, and pretty much any documents before typewriters became common place. And even then there was still a lot of cursive materials being created.