Typesetting

From Freepedia

Image:Metal movable type.jpg Typesetting involves the presentation of textual material in an aesthetic form on paper or some other media. Before the development of innovations such as the dot matrix, inkjet and laser printers, printed material was produced in print shops.

In spite of centuries of innovation, the principle of printing remains the same: either a particular part of the page is marked or not marked with ink. This has remained true at the microscopic level even for halftone and four-color printing. Typesetting is the technology of deciding which parts of the paper should be marked, and printing is the technology of making the marks. However, the two are not rigidly separated: for example, ink flows during the printing process, and type design has to take into account the dynamics of ink on paper.

With early printing presses, individual letters and characters were on blocks (usually of metal, sometimes of wood), which would be assembled for each page.

The setting of individual letters was rendered obsolete by hot-metal setting machines such as the Linotype machine. The Linotype, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler, permitted one machine operator to do the work of ten hand type operators.

The computer era

Computers are useful in automatically typesetting documents. Character-by-character computer-aided phototypesetting (now known as imagesetting) replaced systems such as Linotype in the 1980s, and was in turn rapidly rendered obsolete by modern systems which employ a raster image processor to render an entire page to a single high-resolution digital image which is then photoset.

In the late 1980s desktop publishing on microcomputers became available, starting with the Apple Macintosh. Programs like Adobe PageMaker and Adobe InDesign have not only popularized desktop publishing, but have also given more control to professional typesetters.

Before the 1980s, most typesetting for publishers and advertisers was performed by typesetting companies, often called typographers. These companies, which performed keyboarding, editing and production of paper or film output, formed a large component of the graphic arts industry. By the year 2000, this industry segment had all but vanished, as publishers were now capable of integrating their typesetting and graphic design on their own in-house computers. The availability of cheap, or free, type fonts made the conversion to do-it-yourself complete, and the advent of the PDF file format provided a universally readable method of proofing designs and layouts.

The TeX system is another widespread and powerful automatic typesetter. Other typesetting engines, like Advent 3B2, allow the user to program their typesetting process with the help of programming languages.