ABSTRACT
If we leave the world of the ‘book’ and the individual reader for that of the ‘governmental archive’, the situation improves to a certain extent. From at least as early as the Hellenistic period, visual clues appear in documents that make it clear to the experienced in antiquity and the knowledgeable today what kind of document was involved. The classical scribes intuitively know what Donald Norman states directly: ‘The most appropriate format depends upon the task, which means that no single format can ever be correct for all purposes.’1 Classical scribes used a variety of means to indicate different kinds of documents, including hanging indents, large initial letters, different spacings between sections, and changes in scripts for different writers.2 As Roger Bagnall puts it, ‘Everything has more articulation than prose literature.’3 Turner says that ‘Good layout is one aid which a practised scribe does not despise.’4 Layout, however, is one thing; the text itself remains in the preferred format of scriptio continua. Moreover, that writing could be difficult to read, because it was often written in a rapid cursive which eschewed full articulation of individual letters.5
