A Look Back at Typesetting Technology

It is not my intention to discontinue or replace the advertising sales content on this blog but to only add additional postings about the history of typesetting (at least as I have experienced it). I think it's interesting that all of the technologies we take for granted today are evolutionary extensions of the technologies that were used years ago. Products like InDesign and Photoshop didn't just show up. They came about as improvements to products and processes that preceded them. It is the rapid speed of technological change that I am most interested in, but seen from the perspective of not only where it is going, but where it has been. As print production technology has changed, advertisers have had to adopt to those changes just as publishers have. The creation of advertising material has had to keep up with the technologies used to produce the magazines in which those ads appear. So, the changes that have altered the print production process have effected everyone involved in the creation and production of a publication and all of its content, editorial and advertising. Please let me know if you are enjoying these postings.

Although I have spent most of my career in advertising sales, I actually started my career on the production side of the business. I recently installed the latest version of Adobe InDesign, and as I look at the amazing functions available to me with just a few clicks of a mouse, I think back to the way I first learned how to do typesetting and layout years before the invention of the personal computer.

Not that many years ago, typesetting technology was broken into two categories: hot type and cold type. Hot type referred, primarily, to the Linotype machine, a device that used molten lead poured into molds that formed the individual letters. Much of the terminology used in modern typesetting—leading, for instance, the insertion of a blank piece of lead to add space between lines of type—came from that technology. But, Linotype machines required skilled operators to run them, were expensive, and because of their size and the amount of heat generated from them (in order to keep the lead molten), they were found only in commercial facilities. Cold type came about as the photo offset printing process developed. It created a market for companies to enter the typesetting business by creating relatively low cost devices that would set type which could then be photographed and converted to offset printing plates. One of the earliest entrants of this technology was the Addressograph-Multigraph Corporation, and their machine, the Varityper, was the first typesetting machine I learned to use.

Using the Varityper was slow and tedious work. First, the pica width of the column was set with margin guides. A sheet of paper was inserted into the machine and each line of a story was typed twice, once to allow the machine to determine how much extra space needed to be added between each word, and then after setting a dial that added that additional space, a second time to produce a justified line of type. Line after line was done this way until you created a fully justified column of type. This was then “pasted-up” on a layout sheet to create a single copy of each page of a document which was then photographed and the negative used to create a printing plate.

With all of this typing and retyping, one was sure to have some typos in the text, which occurred often. When a mistyped word was spotted, the corrected word was typed on the border of the paper. The finished paper was then taken to a light table and the corrected word was positioned on top of the incorrect word and an X-Acto knife was used to cut through both layers at the same time. The old word was discarded, and the new one, which fit perfectly in the cutout space, was held in place by a piece of clear tape applied to the back side of the paper. This tedious process certainly taught those of us who used the machine and then had to correct our own errors how to type as accurately as possible.

Each typestyle or font came as a family, so it was easy to have a word set in bold or italic. It was just a matter of changing the font, which was a half-moon shaped metal form containing all of the characters. Picture it as the predecessor to IBM’s “golf ball” font utilized on the Selectric typewriter. But, the Varityper created very sharp type that photographed clearly and printed well on a machine that required little more than basic typing skills in order to operate. Although I didn’t know it at the time, this was the predecessor to desktop publishing as we came to know it when the IBM PC was introduced years later.

So, I am going back to a document I am creating in InDesign. I don’t have to type each line of type two times, I have hundreds of typestyles available to me in sizes ranging from 6 point to 72 points, if I should find a typo, I will edit it directly on the screen, and there is not a drawing board, X-Acto knife, t-square, or paste anywhere near where I am sitting. But, I do look back fondly at my time in front of a Varityper as it taught me the basic skills of typography that I can still apply today.

Next week, I will talk about the next device I learned to use, the IBM MTSC composing system.

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