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Movable type on a composing stick on a type case.

A specimen sheet issued by William Caslon, letter founder, from the 1728 edition of Cyclopaedia.

Diagram of a cast metal sort.

Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types.^[1]

Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner. Typesetting is the retrieval of the stored letters (called sorts in mechanical systems and glyphs in digital systems) and the ordering of them according to a language's orthography for visual display.

Letterpress era[link]

During the letterpress era, moveable type was composed by hand for each page. Cast metal sorts were composited into words and lines of text and tightly bound together to make up a page image called a forme, with all letter faces exactly the same height to form an even surface of type. The forme was mounted in a press, inked, and an impression made on paper.

The diagram at right illustrates a cast metal sort: a face, b body or shank, c point size, 1 shoulder, 2 nick, 3 groove, 4 foot. Wooden printing sorts were in use for centuries in combination with metal type.

Copies of formes were cast when anticipating subsequent printings of a text, freeing the costly type for other work. In this process, called stereotyping, the entire forme is pressed into a fine matrix such as plaster of Paris or papier mâché called Flong to create a positive, from which the stereotype forme was cast of type metal.

Hand composing was rendered commercially obsolete by continuous casting or hot-metal typesetting machines such as the Linotype machine and Monotype at the end of the 19th century. The Linotype, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler, enabled one machine operator to do the work of ten hand compositors by automating the selection, use and replacement of sorts, with a keyboard as input. Later advances such as the typewriter and computer would push the state of the art even farther ahead. Still, hand composition and letterpress printing did not fall completely out of use, and since the introduction of digital typesetting, it has seen a revival as an artisanal pursuit. However, it is a very small niche within the larger typesetting market.

Phototypesetting[link]

Linotype CRTronic 360 phototypesetting terminal.

Phototypesetting or "cold type" systems first appeared in the early 1960s and rapidly displaced continuous casting machines. These devices consisted of glass disks (one per font) that spun in front of a light source which selectively exposed characters onto light-sensitive paper. Originally they were driven by pre-punched paper tapes. Later they were hooked up to computer front ends.

One of the earliest electronic photocomposition systems was introduced by Fairchild Semiconductor. The typesetter typed a line of text on a Fairchild keyboard that had no display. To verify correct content of the line it was typed a second time. If the two lines were identical a bell rang and the machine produced a punched paper tape corresponding to the text. With the completion of a block of lines the typesetter fed the corresponding paper tapes into a phototypesetting device which mechanically set type outlines printed on glass sheets into place for exposure onto a negative film. Photosensitive paper was exposed to light through the negative film, resulting in a column of black type on white paper, or a galley. The galley was then cut up and used to create a mechanical drawing or paste up of a whole page. A large film negative of the page is shot and used to make plates for offset printing.

Digital era[link]

Dutch newsreel from 1977 about the transition to computer typesetting

The next generation of phototypesetting machines to emerge were those that generated characters on a cathode ray tube. Typical of the type were the Alphanumeric APS2 (1963),^[2] IBM 2680 (1967), I.I.I. VideoComp (1973?), Linotron 202 (1978),^[3] and Autologic APS5 (1980?). These machines were the mainstay of phototypesetting for much of the 1970s and 1980s. Such machines could be 'driven online' by a computer front-end system or take their data from magnetic tape. Type fonts were stored digitally on conventional magnetic disk drives.

Computers excel at automatically typesetting and correcting documents^[4]. Character-by-character, computer-aided phototypesetting was, in turn, rapidly rendered obsolete in the 1980s by fully digital systems employing a raster image processor to render an entire page to a single high-resolution digital image, now known as imagesetting.

The first commercially successful laser imagesetter, able to make use of a raster image processor was the Monotype Lasercomp. ECRM, Compugraphic (later purchased by Agfa) and others rapidly followed suit with machines of their own.

Early minicomputer-based typesetting software introduced in the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Datalogics Pager, Penta, Atex, Miles 33, Xyvision, troff from Bell Labs, and IBM's Script product with CRT terminals, were better able to drive these electromechanical devices, and used text markup languages to describe type and other page formatting information. The descendants of these text markup languages include SGML, XML and HTML.

The minicomputer systems output columns of text on film for paste-up and eventually produced entire pages and signatures of 4, 8, 16 or more pages using imposition software on devices such as the Israeli-made Scitex Dolev. The data stream used by these systems to drive page layout on printers and imagesetters, often proprietary or specific to a manufacturer or device, drove development of generalized printer control languages, such as Adobe Systems' PostScript and Hewlett-Packard's HP PCL.

Before the 1980s, practically all typesetting for publishers and advertisers was performed by specialist typesetting companies. These companies performed keyboarding, editing and production of paper or film output, and formed a large component of the graphic arts industry. In the United States, these companies were located in rural Pennsylvania, New England or the Midwest, where labor was cheap and paper was produced nearby, but still within a few hours' travel time of the major publishing centers.

In 1985, desktop publishing became available, starting with the Apple Macintosh, Aldus PageMaker (and later QuarkXPress) and PostScript. Improvements in software and hardware, and rapidly lowering costs, popularized desktop publishing and enabled very fine control of typeset results much less expensively than the minicomputer dedicated systems. At the same time, word processing systems, such as Wang and WordPerfect, revolutionized office documents. They did not, however, have the typographic ability or flexibility required for complicated book layout, graphics, mathematics, or advanced hyphenation and justification rules (H and J).

By the year 2000, this industry segment had shrunk because publishers were now capable of integrating typesetting and graphic design on their own in-house computers. Many found the cost of maintaining high standards of typographic design and technical skill made it more economical to outsource to freelancers and graphic design specialists.

The availability of cheap, or free, fonts made the conversion to do-it-yourself easier, but also opened up a gap between skilled designers and amateurs. The advent of PostScript, supplemented by the PDF file format, provided a universal method of proofing designs and layouts, readable on major computer and operating systems.

SCRIPT variants[link]

Mural mosaic "Typesetter" at John A. Prior Health Sciences Library in Ohio

IBM created and inspired a family of typesetting languages with names that were derivatives of the word "SCRIPT". Later versions of SCRIPT included advanced features, such as automatic generation of a table of contents and index, multicolumn page layout, footnotes, boxes, automatic hyphenation and spelling verification.^[5]

NSCRIPT was a port of SCRIPT to OS and TSO from CP-67/CMS SCRIPT.^[6]

Waterloo Script was created at the University of Waterloo later.^[7] One version of SCRIPT was created at MIT and the AA/CS at UW took over project development in 1974. The program was first used at UW in 1975. In the 1970s, SCRIPT was the only practical way to word process and format documents using a computer. By the late 1980s, the SCRIPT system had been extended to incorporate various upgrades.^[8]

The initial implementation of SCRIPT at UW was documented in the May 1975 issue of the Computing Centre Newsletter which noted some the advantages of using SCRIPT:

a) Footnotes are handled easily.

b) Page numbers can be in Arabic or Roman numerals, and can appear at the top or bottom of the page, in the centre, on the left or on the right, or even-numbered pages and on the right for odd-numbered pages.

c) Underscoring or overstriking can be made a function of SCRIPT, thus uncomplicating editor functions.

d) SCRIPT files are regular OS datasets or CMS files.

e) Output can be obtained on the printer, or at the terminal…” The article also pointed out SCRIPT had over 100 commands to assist in formatting documents, though 8 to 10 of these commands were sufficient to complete most formatting jobs. Thus, SCRIPT had many of the capabilities computer users generally associate with contemporary word processors.^[9]

SCRIPT/VS was a SCRIPT variant developed at IBM in the 1980s.

DWScript is a version of SCRIPT for MS-DOS, called after its author, D. D. Williams^[10], but was never released to the public and only used internally by IBM.

Script is still available from IBM as part of the Document Composition Facility for the z/OS operating system.^[11]

SGML and XML systems[link]

The standard generalized markup language (SGML) was based upon IBM Generalized Markup Language (GML). GML was a set of macros on top of IBM Script.

The arrival of SGML/XML as the document model made other typesetting engines popular. Such engines include RenderX's XEP, Datalogics Pager, Penta, Miles 33's OASYS, Xyvision's XML Professional Publisher (XPP), FrameMaker, Arbortext, YesLogic's Prince, QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. These products allow users to program their typesetting process around the SGML/XML with the help of scripting languages. Some of them, such as Arbortext Editor and XMetaL Author, provide attractive WYSIWYG-ish interfaces with support for XML standards and Unicode to attract a wider spectrum of users.

Troff and successors[link]

During the mid-1970s, Joseph Ossanna, working at Bell Laboratories, wrote the troff typesetting program to drive a Wang C/A/T phototypesetter owned by the Labs; it was later enhanced by Brian Kernighan to support output to different equipment, such as laser printers and the like. While its use has fallen off, it is still included with a number of Unix and Unix-like systems, and has been used to typeset a number of high-profile technical and computer books. Some versions, as well as a GNU work-alike called groff, are now open source.

TeX and LaTeX[link]

Mathematical text typeset using TeX and the AMS Euler font.

The TeX system, developed by Donald E. Knuth at the end of the 1970s, is another widespread and powerful automated typesetting system that has set high standards, especially for typesetting mathematics. TeX is considered fairly difficult to learn on its own, and deals more with appearance than structure. The LaTeX macro package written by Leslie Lamport at the beginning of the 1980s offered a simpler interface, and an easier way to systematically encode the structure of a document. LaTeX markup is very widely used in academic circles for published papers and even books. Although standard TeX does not provide an interface of any sort, there are programs that do. These programs include Scientific Workplace, TeXmacs and LyX, which are graphical/interactive editors .

See also[link]

• Composing stick
• Dingbat
• Hot metal typesetting
• Justification (typesetting)
• Ligature (typography)
• Printing
• Printing press
• Sort (typesetting)
• Strut (typesetting)
• Technical writing
• Typeface
• Typography
• Widows and orphans
• Formula editor
• SCRIPT (markup)

References[link]

Look up typesetting in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

External links[link]

• Metal Type - For Those who Remember Hot Metal Typesetting
• TeX Users Group
• The Lout Document Formatting System
• XML page at www.W3C.org
• SGML page at www.xml.org
• TYPESET-8, the first low cost computerized type setting system
• 1960 era Typesetting in the 1960 era.
• Typesetting and Desktop Publishing Information
• Symbols - Comprehensive list of typographical symbols

v t e Typography terminology Page Column Canons of page construction Margin Page numbering Pagination Pull quote Recto and verso Paragraph Alignment Justification Leading River Sentence spacing Widows and orphans Character Typeface anatomy Counter Diacritics Dingbat Glyph Initial Kerning Letter-spacing Ligature Subscript and superscript Swash Text figures Capitalization Letter case Small caps CamelCase Petite caps All caps Vertical aspects Ascender Descender Baseline Cap height Median Overshoot x-height Classifications Roman type Antiqua (Old Style) Transitional Didone (Modern) Serif Slab serif Sans-serif Script Blackletter type Textualis Rotunda Schwabacher Fraktur Gaelic type Angular Uncial Punctuation Dashes Hanging punctuation Hyphenation Quotation mark Prime mark Typesetting Calligraphy ETAOIN SHRDLU Font Computer font Font catalog Letterpress Lorem ipsum Movable type Pangram Phototypesetting Punchcutting Type design Typeface Type foundry Microtypography Typographic units Point Pica Cicero Em En Figure space Thin space Paren space Agate Measure Digital typography Font formats Typesetting software Character encoding Rasterization Hinting