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Constraints on the spatial manifestation of written text has a further implication relating to the characteristics of writing as graphic form. Because writing is typically located either on portable surfaces or on surfaces that are intended to be read in very specific contexts and for very specific purposes, we have a very clear idea of its graphic constituents’ — that is, its letters’ — size. Letters must always be a good size for reading, big enough to allow us to distinguish the differences which constitute symbolic structure, small enough to copy-fit a significant gobbet of text in the available surface area. Letter forms are, in the Structuralist’s sense, arbitrary. To support the differences they establish, they must be relatively complex shapes, and yet they must become familiar, in the culture where they are current, especially to literate viewers, for whom their very differentiated complexities enable reading. Graphically, and in terms of phenomenology, this gives us — culturally, experientially — a vocabulary of graphic forms about whose size we have very specific ideas and expectations.