> So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters.

Seriously? You're claiming printers invented shorthand and abbreviations to make working with movable type easier? They were common in handwriting and predate the printing press. Look! Even the Wikipedia page for abbreviation has an illustration from scribal handwriting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation.

> Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!

No, that's from handwriting, invented in the 8th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s). Go read the original handwritten copies of the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. You don't have to read far until you find a long s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I... (necessary, 3rd line/1st line of cursive)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constitution_of_the_Unite... (bessings, 2nd line)

In conclusion, everything in your comment is totally wrong.