Phototypesetting
[1][2] It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing which gave rise to digital typesetting.
Phototypesetting offered numerous advantages over the metal type used in letterpress printing, including the lack of need to keep heavy metal type and matrices in stock, the ability to use a much wider range of fonts and graphics and to print them at any desired size, and faster page layout setting.
The use of phototypesetting grew rapidly in the 1960s when software was developed to convert marked up copy, usually typed on paper tape, to the codes that controlled the phototypesetters.
In 1949 the Photon Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts developed equipment based on the Lumitype of Rene Higonnet and Louis Moyroud.
Early CRT phototypesetters, such as Linotype's Linotron 1010 from 1966, used the same type of film negative for the font source as traditional optical phototypesetters did, but by instead scanning the font negative via a flying spot scanner array to a video signal, which was then displayed on the CRT to be exposed to the photographic paper or film.
The RCA Graphic Systems Division manufactured this in the U.S. as the Videocomp, later marketed by Information International Inc. Software for operator-controlled hyphenation was a major component of digital typesetting.
The earliest applications of computer-controlled phototypesetting machines produced the output of the Russian translation programs of Gilbert King at the IBM Research Laboratories, and built-up mathematical formulas and other material in the Cooperative Computing Laboratory of Michael Barnett at MIT.
There are extensive accounts of the early applications,[6] the equipment[7][8] and the PAGE I algorithmic typesetting language for the Videocomp, that introduced elaborate formatting[9] In Europe, the company of Berthold had no experience in developing hot-metal typesetting equipment, but being one of the largest German type foundries, they applied themselves to the transference.
Berthold successfully developed its Diatype (1960), Diatronic (1967), and ADS (1977) machines, which led the European high-end typesetting market for decades.
Compugraphic produced phototypesetting machines in the 1970s that made it economically feasible for small publications to set their own type with professional quality.
One model, the Compugraphic Compuwriter, uses a filmstrip wrapped around a drum that rotates at several hundred revolutions per minute.
Other manufacturers of photo compositing machines include Alphatype, Varityper, Mergenthaler, Autologic, Berthold, Dymo, Harris (formerly Linotype's competitor "Intertype"), Monotype, Star/Photon, Graphic Systems Inc., Hell AG, MGD Graphic Systems, and American Type Founders.
Because early generations of phototypesetters could not change text size and font easily, many composing rooms and print shops had special machines designed to set display type or headlines.
Compugraphic's model 7200 uses the "strobe-through-a-filmstrip-through-a-lens" technology to expose letters and characters onto a 35mm strip of phototypesetting paper that is then developed by a photo processor.
Video Setters were almost all newspaper machines and limited to 45 picas wide with a maximum character size of 72 pints.
The printing scan rate had to be held constant to prevent overexposing or underexposing the type.
As phototypesetting machines matured as a technology in the 1970s, more efficient methods were found for creating and subsequently editing text intended for the printed page.
CRT-based editing terminals, which can work compatibly with a variety of phototypesetting machines, were a major technical innovation in this regard.
An early developer of CRT-based editing terminals for photocomposition machines was Omnitext of Ann Arbor, Michigan.
[13] With the start of desktop publishing software, Trout Computing in California introduced VepSet, which allows Xerox Ventura Publisher to be used as a front end and wrote a Compugraphic MCS disk with typesetting codes to reproduce the page layout.
I nearly had to introduce serifs in order to prevent rounded-off corners – instead of a sans-serif the drafts were a bunch of misshapen sausages!
