Typesetting
Setting the original copy in a specified typeface and point size is typesetting
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Movable metal type |
Typesetting involves the presentation of textual material in an aesthetic form on paper or some other
medium. Before the advent of
desktop publishing, typesetting of printed material was produced in print shops by
compositors working by hand, and later with machines.
After centuries of innovation the basic principle of typesetting remains the same: the
composition of glyphs into lines to form
body matter, headings, captions and other pieces of text to make up a page image, and the
printing or transfer of the page image onto paper and other media. The two disciplines are closely related. For example, in
letterpress printing, ink spreads under the pressure of the press, and typesetters take this dynamic factor into account to achieve clean and legible results.
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Diagram of a cast metal sort |
During the letterpress era, with the invention of moveable type in Europe circa 1450, individual printing characters were made of blocks of
type metal, and called
sorts, assembled by hand for each
page. In the diagram at right, the main parts:
a face,
b body or shank,
c point size,
1 shoulder,
2 nick,
3 groove,
4 foot. Wooden printing sorts had been in use for centuries and were combined with metal type.
Hand compositing was rendered 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.
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A Specimen of typesetting by William Caslon, letter founder; from 1728 edition of Cyclopaedia. |
Computers excel at automatically typesetting documents. Character-by-character computer-aided
phototypesetting (now known as
imagesetting) replaced
continuous casting machines in the
1980s, and was in turn rapidly rendered obsolete by fully digital systems employing a
raster image processor to
render an entire page to a single high-resolution
digital image which is then photoset.
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Text typeset using digital page layout software. The source text is an extract from The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe |
In the late 1980s
desktop publishing became available, starting with the
Apple Macintosh. Programs like
Adobe PageMaker and
QuarkXPress popularized desktop publishing and enabled very fine control of typeset results.
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. By the year
2000, this industry segment had shrunk. 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 skills made it more economical to out-source to a new breed of designer/typesetter.
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.
SGML and XML systems
The arrival of
SGML/
XML as the document model made other typesetting engines popular. Such engines include Penta, Miles 33 OASYS, Xyvision's
XML Professional Publisher (XPP),
FrameMaker,
Arbortext Advanced Print Publisher (a.k.a. 3B2),
YesLogic's
Prince and
InDesign, which allow the users to program their typesetting process around the SGML/XML with the help of scripting languages. Some of them provide attractive
WYSIWYG interfaces with support for XML standards and
Unicode to attract a wider spectrum of users.
troff and successors
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 workalike called
groff, are now
open source.
TeX
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Mathematical text typeset using TeX and the AMS Euler font. |
The
TeX system, created by
Donald E. Knuth, is another widespread and powerful automated typesetting system that has set high standards, especially for typesetting mathematics. Standard TeX does not provide a WYSIWYG interface.
*
dingbat*
hot metal typesetting*
justification (typesetting)*
ligature*
orphan (typesetting)*
printing*
printing press*
typeface*
typography*
widow (typesetting)*
strut (typesetting)*
composing stick*
Typowiki, a type wiki at
typophile.com*
Metal Type - For Those who Remember Hot Metal Typesetting*
TeX Users Group*
XML page at www.W3C.org*
SGML page at www.xml.org
