versions into his eighties. Palatino family Palatino Palatino itself, as previously noted, has a solid structure, intended to read clearly on poor-quality paper and printing; Zapf's friend Alexander Lawson wrote that "the open counters that make Palatino such a legible letter were provided to overcome a then current printing problem in Germany, poor-quality paper. The weight of the type was also thickened beyond that of a normal roman in order to adapt to the lithographic and gravure printing processes of that period. Zapf has steadily maintained that he did not create Palatino as a book type but rather as a commercial face." Due to Palatino's increasing popularity in body text, multiple versions have been released for the changing technologies of handsetting, hot metal typesetting, phototypesetting and digital font design. Later versions often have regularised details such as a lower 't' and foot serifs on 'p' and 'q'. The italic in particular has gone through several redesigns, with the original for hand-set foundry type being distinctly narrow, the version for the Linotype machine distinctly wide to enable duplexing with the roman, and the versions for subsequent photosetting and digital technologies being in between the two extremes. Hutner and Kelly have described Palatino as "distinctly modern... a modern type not copied from any specific early model." Palatino's italic in metal type included a set of swash capitals. These have not been found in digitisations, although digitisations of Zapf's Renaissance Antiqua design (discussed below) do include a (slightly different) set. Later versions alter the descenders on many letters; Zapf originally had to keep these short to fit on the German common line standard, optimised for blackletter typefaces; later versions escape this restriction. Aldus Aldus is an old-style serif design, popular for use in book printing. Compared to Palatino, released some years earlier, it has a more condensed design lighter in colour, more graceful and refined and better suited to the high average quality of book printing. Aldus has a non-kerning roman and italic f, allowing the typographer to avoid ligatures. It appeared in the D. Stempel AG catalog in 1954 and Zapf used it to set his own Manuale Typographicum, a history of letter design. Aldus is named for the Venetian Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius. The decision annoyed Zapf (who preferred the name "Palatino Book") since it bears little direct resemblance to Aldus's typefaces. Like Palatino, an upgraded digitisation, Aldus nova, has been