Old-style serif fonts, such as 
Garamond,  contained two capital Qs: one with a short tail to be used in short  words, and another with a long tail to be used in long words.
[17] Some early 
metal type fonts included up to 3 different Qs: a short-tailed Q, a long-tailed Q, and a long-tailed Q-u 
ligature.
[14]  This print tradition was alive and well until the 19th century, when  long-tailed Qs fell out of favor: even recreations of classic typefaces  such as 
Caslon began being distributed with only short Q tails.
[20][14] Not a fan of long-tailed Qs, American typographer 
D. B. Updike celebrated their demise in his 1922 book 
Printing Types, claiming that Renaissance printers made their Q tails longer and longer simply to "outdo each other".
[14] Latin-language  words, which are much more likely than English words to contain "Q" as  their first letter, have also been cited as the reason for their  existence.
[14] The long-tailed Q had fallen completely out of use with the advent of early 
digital typography,  as many early digital fonts could not choose different glyphs based on  the word that the glyph was in, but it has seen something of a comeback  with the advent of 
OpenType fonts and 
LaTeX, both of which can automatically typeset the long-tailed Q when it is called for and the short-tailed Q when not.
[21][22] 
Owing to the allowable variation in the Q, the letter is a very distinctive fea
			
		
 
	
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