I have decided to publish a series of articles all about the different rules of typesetting, as they seem to have been lost since in these days of computers and desktop publishing software.
Printed material used to be produced by a hot-metal typesetting machines, before specialist phototypesetting machines took over. I trained as a Typesetter, whilst working for Century Litho, back in the early 1980′s.
Photo of CRTronic 360 courtesy Marcin Wichary from San Francisco, U.S.A.
It was extremely difficult back in those days, as the screen was very small, with a limited access to fonts. I remember we had a choice of 5 – Times, Univers, Cheltenham, Garamond and Dingbats, but not all at the same time!
The type was produced by a series of coding instructions, similar to html, this transferred onto light sensitive paper and you had no idea how it looked until the paper had been processed in the dark room. If you got the leading wrong then it was a jumbled mess – but I enjoyed it.
After using the CR Tronic, I went onto the Itek 1410, which was a very noisy machine. Then the Scantext 1000 by this time the Preview screen had been incorporated and that was such a time-saving device, to actually view on screen how your work would look!
Then lastly I used a Compugraphic, still on photographic paper but daylight processors were available. This was in the days of “cut and paste”, which faded out with the introduction of Apple Macs.
So the articles will feature essential typesetting information.
