= new reply since forum marked as read
"Get off my case."
Where does that come from??
Charles the First (also known as Charles the Great or Charlemagne) was mostly responsible for the distinction. Many of the court scribes were trained in monastaries where they learned the rounded Celtic forms that were easier to create with a bladed pen nib. However, the first letters in a stanza were written based upon the Roman Trajan column form letters that had become standardized with the Roman occupation of Western Europe. Charlemagne formalized this in a format called Carolingian (Carol being the Latinate French version of Charles), with the Roman forms then known as majuscule format (literally, "somewhat larger"
and the more Celtic forms known as the minuscule ("somewhat smaller" form.
By the fifteenth century, as printers such as Gutenberg in Germany and Caxton in England started using pressed type, they began with wood but eventually switched to lead, which was more durable and didn't absorb the ink. In general, most letters were defined with an x-height (the height of a lower case x) with upper case characters being two x-height tall and lower case characters being from one to three x-heights tall, depending upon whether there were ascenders or descenders on the letters. Each line was then separated by strips of lead, such that leading became the term indicated the distance from the baseline of one line of characters to the baseline of the next.
Additionally, all type was set right-to-left and backwards, so that the impression would be left-to-right. A cold-press typesetter learned how to read right to left faster than most people could read left-to-right. It's a skill that has since been lost to time, as photolithography replaced leaded type in the 1970s and 80s. However, most modern typography still has terms that date from the leaded type era.