Type Elements and Fonts
The Selectric I, Selectric II, and all of the "Magnetic Card" and "Magnetic Tape" variations except for the Composers, used the same typing elements. These were available in many fonts, including symbols for science and mathematics, OCR faces for scanning by computers, cursive script, "Old English" (fraktur), and more than a dozen ordinary alphabets. The Israeli typographer Henri Friedlaender designed the Hebrew fonts Hadar, Shalom & Aviv for the Selectric. The Selectric III and "Electronic Typewriters" used a new 96-character element.
IBM also produced computer terminals based on the Selectric mechanism, some of which (all models of the IBM 1050 series, and IBM 2741 models using "PTTC/BCD" code) used a different encoding. Though the elements were physically interchangeable, the characters were differently arranged, so that standard Selectric elements could not be used in them, and their elements could not be used in standard Selectrics. On the other hand, IBM 2741s using "correspondence coding" used standard office Selectric elements. The IBM 1130 computer used a Selectric mechanism as the console printer.
There were two visibly different styles of mechanical design for the elements. The original models had a metal spring clip with two wire wings that were squeezed together to release the element from the typewriter. Later models had a plastic lever on a metal molded around a metal axle which pried apart the now-internal spring clip. This had a tendency to break where the lever joined the axle. The Selectric element was later redesigned to have an all-plastic lever.
Some of the interchangeable font elements available for the Selectric models included:
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