Phototypesetting is a method of
setting typeTypesetting involves the presentation of textual material in graphic form on paper or some other medium. Before the advent of desktop publishing, typesetting of printed material was produced in print shops by compositors or typesetters working by hand, and later with machines.The general principle...
, rendered obsolete with the popularity of the
personal computerA personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end user, with no intervening computer operator...
and
desktop publishingDesktop publishing combines a personal computer and WYSIWYG page layout software to create publication documents on a computer for either large scale publishing or small scale local multifunction peripheral output and distribution....
software, that uses a
photographA photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...
ic process to generate columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper. Typesetters used a machine called a phototypesetter, which would quickly project
lightLight is electromagnetic radiation, particularly radiation of a wavelength that is visible to the human eye ....
through a film negative image of an individual character in a
fontIn typography, a font is traditionally defined as a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
, through a lens that would magnify or reduce the size of the character onto
filmThis article is about light-sensitive photographic media; for digital printing media please see Photo printer, photo paper and inkjet paper.Photographic paper is paper coated with light-sensitive chemicals, used for making photographic prints....
, which would collect on a spool in a light-tight canister.
Phototypesetting is a method of
setting typeTypesetting involves the presentation of textual material in graphic form on paper or some other medium. Before the advent of desktop publishing, typesetting of printed material was produced in print shops by compositors or typesetters working by hand, and later with machines.The general principle...
, rendered obsolete with the popularity of the
personal computerA personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end user, with no intervening computer operator...
and
desktop publishingDesktop publishing combines a personal computer and WYSIWYG page layout software to create publication documents on a computer for either large scale publishing or small scale local multifunction peripheral output and distribution....
software, that uses a
photographA photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...
ic process to generate columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper. Typesetters used a machine called a phototypesetter, which would quickly project
lightLight is electromagnetic radiation, particularly radiation of a wavelength that is visible to the human eye ....
through a film negative image of an individual character in a
fontIn typography, a font is traditionally defined as a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
, through a lens that would magnify or reduce the size of the character onto
filmThis article is about light-sensitive photographic media; for digital printing media please see Photo printer, photo paper and inkjet paper.Photographic paper is paper coated with light-sensitive chemicals, used for making photographic prints....
, which would collect on a spool in a light-tight canister. The film would then be fed into a processor, a machine that would pull the film through two or three baths of chemicals, where it would emerge ready for
paste upPaste up refers to a method of creating, or laying out, publication pages that predates the use of the now-standard computerized page design desktop publishing programs. Completed, or camera-ready, pages are known as mechanicals or mechanical art...
.
History
Phototypesetting (sometimes referred to as "cold type") dates back to the 1940s, but the technology became popular in the early 1970s when it replaced
metal typesettingHot Type is a Canadian television series, which airs weekly on CBC Newsworld. Hosted by Evan Solomon, the program profiles books and literature.The series also formerly aired in the United States on Trio and Newsworld International....
as offset lithography printing grew in popularity. A number of hot-metal equipment manufacturers (Mergenthaler
LinotypeThe Mergenthaler Linotype Company was founded in the United States in 1886 to market the linecaster invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. With the company's primary product, the Linotype , it became the world's leading manufacturer of book and newspaper typesetting equipment; outside North America, its...
, and the
Monotype CorporationMonotype Imaging Inc. is a typesetting and typeface design company responsible for many developments in printing technology — in particular the Monotype machine which was the first fully mechanical typesetter — and the design and production of typefaces in the 19th and 20th centuries...
for example) began adapting their technology, while other companies like Alphatype and Varityper formed as a result of new printing technology demand. In Europe, the company of Berthold had no experience in developing hot-metal typesetting equipment, but being one of the largest German type foundries, they knew everything about type. Berthold successfully developed its Diatype (1960), Diatronic (1967), and ads (1977) machines, which led the European high-end typesetting market for decades.
CompugraphicCompugraphic Corporation was an American producer of typesetting systems and phototypesetting equipment, based, at the time of the Agfa merger, in Wilmington, Massachusetts, just a few miles from where it was founded...
produced phototypesetting machines in the 1970s made it economically feasible for a number of small publications to set their own type professionally. One model, the Compugraphic Compuwriter, used a filmstrip wrapped around a drum that rotated at several hundred revolutions per minute. The filmstrip contained two fonts (a Roman and a bold or a Roman and an italic) in one point size. To get different sized fonts, the typesetter loaded a different font strip or used a 2x magnifying lens built into the machine, which doubled the size of font. The CompuWriter II automated the lens switch and let the operator use multiple settings. Other manufacturers of photo compositing machines included Alphatype, Varityper and Mergenthaler, not to forget the ATF (American Type Founders) Phototypesetters model "A", "B" and "B-8".
In 1975, the Compuwriter IV, as well as the Compuwriter 88, a stripped down version, held two filmstrips, each holding four fonts. (Usually a Roman, italic, bold, and bold italic font). It also had a lens turret which had eight lenses giving different point sizes from the font, generally 8 or 12 sizes, depending on the model. The low-end offered sizes from 6 to 36 point, while the high-end models went to 72 point. The Compugraphic EditWriter series took the Compuwriter IV configuration and added
floppy diskA floppy disk is a data storage medium that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. Floppy disks are read and written by a floppy disk drive or FDD, the initials of which should not be confused with "fixed disk drive," which...
storage on an 8-inch, 320K disk. This allowed the typesetter to make changes and corrections without rekeying. A
Cathode ray tubeThe cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen, with internal or external means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam, used to create images in the form of light emitted from the fluorescent screen...
(CRT) screen let the user view typesetting codes and text.
Because early generations of phototypesetters couldn't change text size and font easily, many composing rooms and print shops had special machines designed to set display type or headlines. One such model was the PhotoTypositor, manufactured by Visual Graphics Corporation, which let the user position each letter visually and thus retain complete control over
kerningIn typography, kerning—less commonly, mortising — is the process of adjusting letter spacing in a proportional font. In a well-kerned font, the two-dimensional blank spaces between each pair of letters all have similar area.- In metal typesetting :...
. Compugraphic's model 7200 used the "strobe-through-a-filmstrip-through-a-lens" technology to expose letters and characters onto a thin strip of phototypesetting paper that was then developed by photo-processor.
Some later phototypesetters utilized a CRT to project the image of letters onto the photographic paper. This created a sharper image, added some flexibility in manipulating the type, and created the ability to offer a continuous range of point sizes by eliminating film media and lenses. The Compugraphic MCS (Modular Composition System) with the 8400 typesetter is an example of the CRT phototypesetter. This machine loaded digital fonts into memory from an 8-inch floppy. Additionally, the 8400 was able to set type in point sizes between 5 and 120 point in 1/2-point increments. It was extremely fast and was one of the first output systems (the other was also a Compugraphic machine, the 8600) that was able to output camera-ready output with a maximum width of 12 inches.
Early machines had no text storage capability; some machines only displayed 32 characters in uppercase on a small
LEDA light-emitting diode , is an electronic light source. The first LED was built in the 1920s by Oleg Vladimirovich Losev, a radio technician who noticed that diodes used in radio receivers emitted light when current was passed through them...
screen and spellchecking was not available.
Proofing typeset
galleyIn printing and publication, proofs are preliminary versions of publications. They may be uncut and unbound, or in some cases electronic. They are normally created as part of the proofreading and copyediting processes, but can be used for promotional and review purposes also.Galley proofs are so...
s was an important step after developing the photo paper. Corrections could be made by typesetting a word or line of type and by waxing the back of the galleys, and corrections could be cut out with an
X-ActoX-Acto is a brand of tools owned by Elmer's Products, Inc. These tools include knives, saws, tweezers and many other small-scale hand tools used for crafts, hobbies and other applications.-X-Acto knife:...
knife and pasted on top of any mistakes.
Since most early phototypesetting machines could only create one column of type, long galleys of type were pasted onto layout boards in order to create a full page of text for magazines and newsletters. Paste-up artists played an important role in creating production art. Later phototypesetters had multiple column features that allowed the typesetter to save paste-up time.
Early electronic typesetting programs were designed to drive phototypesetters, most notably the Graphic Systems CAT phototypesetter that
trofftroff is a document processing system developed by AT&T for the Unix operating system.-History:troff can trace its origins back to a text formatting program called RUNOFF, written by Jerome H. Saltzer for MIT's CTSS operating system in the mid-1960s...
was designed to provide input for. Though such programs still exist, their output is no longer targeted at any specific form of hardware.
With the start of desktop publishing software, Trout Computing in
CaliforniaCalifornia is the most populous state in the United States, and the third largest by area. California is the second most populous sub-national entity in the Americas, behind only São Paulo, Brazil...
introduced VepSet, which allowed Xerox Ventura Publisher to be used as a front end and wrote a Compugraphic MCS disk with typesetting codes to reproduce the page layout.
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