Typesetting facts for kids

Typesetting is how we arrange letters and words to create printed text. It's like putting together building blocks to make a sentence on a page. This process involves taking individual letters, called "sorts" in older systems or "glyphs" in computer systems, and lining them up correctly to form words and paragraphs.

Typesetting is a key step in making books, newspapers, and magazines. It makes sure the text looks neat and is easy to read.

How Printing Began: The Letterpress Era

For a long time, typesetting was done by hand. Imagine tiny metal letters, each called a sort. Workers would pick these sorts one by one and arrange them into words and lines. They would put them into a special frame called a forme. All the letters had to be exactly the same height to make a flat surface.

Once the letters were arranged, the forme was put into a printing press. Ink was rolled over the letters, and then paper was pressed onto them. This created the printed page.

A single metal letter (sort) has different parts:

• a is the face (the part that prints).
• b is the body or shank (the main part of the letter).
• c is the point size (how tall the letter is).
• 1 is the shoulder.
• 2 is the nick.
• 3 is the groove.
• 4 is the foot.

Sometimes, if many copies of a text were needed later, they would make a mold of the entire forme. This mold was made from materials like plaster or papier mâché. Then, a new metal plate, called a stereotype, was cast from this mold. This saved the original metal letters for other jobs.

Hand typesetting was very slow. In the late 1800s, new machines like the Linotype machine and Monotype changed everything. These "hot-metal" machines could cast whole lines of type at once. One person with a Linotype machine could do the work of ten people setting type by hand! Later, typewriters and computers made typesetting even faster.

Even though new methods came along, hand typesetting is still used today by artists and craftspeople. It's a special skill that keeps the old ways of printing alive.

Light and Paper: Phototypesetting

In the 1960s, a new method called phototypesetting appeared. This was a big change from using hot metal. These machines used light and special paper.

Here's how it worked:

• Characters (letters) were stored on glass disks.
• A light would shine through the disk, picking out the right character.
• This light would then expose the character onto light-sensitive paper.
• The paper would develop, showing the text.

Early phototypesetting machines used paper tapes with holes punched in them to tell the machine which characters to print. Later, computers were connected to these machines.

One early system by Fairchild Semiconductor worked like this: A typesetter would type a line of text. To make sure it was correct, they typed it a second time. If both lines matched, the machine would make a punched paper tape for that line. After a few lines were typed, the paper tapes were fed into the phototypesetting machine. This machine would arrange the character outlines from glass sheets onto a negative film. Then, light would shine through this film onto photosensitive paper, creating a column of black text on white paper. This was called a "galley."

These galleys were then cut and pasted onto a larger sheet to create a full page layout. Finally, a large film negative of the whole page was made. This negative was used to create printing plates for offset printing, which is a common way to print many copies.

Computers Take Over: The Digital Era

Before the 1980s, most typesetting for books and ads was done by special companies. These companies had big machines and skilled workers. They would type, edit, and produce the final printed pages.

Then, in 1985, something revolutionary happened: desktop publishing. This started with the Apple Macintosh computer, along with software like Aldus PageMaker and later QuarkXPress. These tools, combined with PostScript (a language for printing), made it possible for almost anyone to create professional-looking documents on their own computer.

Desktop publishing made typesetting much cheaper and easier. You could control how your text looked right on your screen. At the same time, word processing programs like WordPerfect made it simple to create office documents. However, these word processors weren't as good for complex book layouts or fancy designs.

By the year 2000, many publishing companies started doing their own typesetting and design in-house. They found it was often cheaper to use their own computers. Also, many people started hiring freelance designers or specialists for more complex jobs.

The rise of free or cheap fonts made it even easier for people to do their own typesetting. This also created a difference between skilled designers and amateurs. The PDF file format became very popular. It allowed people to share and view designs and layouts on different computers, making it easy to check how things would look before printing.

Powerful Tools for Digital Text

Many powerful computer programs are used for typesetting today. These programs help arrange text and images for books, magazines, and websites. Some popular ones include FrameMaker, Arbortext, QuarkXPress, and Adobe InDesign. These tools let designers program how their text will be laid out, often using special coding languages like XML. Some even have easy-to-use interfaces where you can see what you're doing as you work.

Early Computer Typesetting: Troff

In the 1970s, a program called troff was created at Bell Laboratories. It was used to control early phototypesetters. Later, it was improved to work with different printers, like laser printers. Even though it's not as common now, troff is still used in some computer systems and has been used to typeset many technical books. There are also free versions available today.

TeX and LaTeX: Perfect for Math

The TeX system was created by Donald Knuth in the late 1970s. It's a very powerful system for typesetting, especially known for making math equations look perfect. Many scientists and mathematicians use TeX or its easier-to-use version, LaTeX, to create their papers and books.

Related pages

• Hot metal typesetting
• Justification (typesetting)
• Printing
• Printing press
• Sort (typesetting)
• Technical writing
• Typeface
• Typography

Images for kids

• 

  Movable type on a composing stick on a type case.

• 

  This shows text from an essay by Oscar Wilde. It's set in a style called Iowan Old Style, showing regular, italic, and small capital letters. The text is arranged to have about 10 words per line, with a specific size and spacing.

• 

  A mural mosaic called "Typesetter" at the John A. Prior Health Sciences Library in Ohio.

See also

In Spanish: Composición tipográfica para niños