Typesetting

One significant effect of typesetting was that authorship of works could be spotted more easily, making it difficult for copiers who have not gained permission.

A tray with many dividers, called a case, contained cast metal sorts, each with a single letter or symbol, but backwards (so they would print correctly).

In letterpress printing, individual letters and punctuation marks were cast on small metal blocks, known as "sorts," and then arranged to form the text for a page.

The diagram at right illustrates a cast metal sort: a face, b body or shank, c point size, 1 shoulder, 2 nick, 3 groove, 4 foot.

Still, hand composition and letterpress printing have not fallen completely out of use, and since the introduction of digital typesetting, it has seen a revival as an artisanal pursuit.

While some, such as the Paige compositor, met with limited success, by the end of the 19th century, several methods had been devised whereby an operator working a keyboard or other devices could produce the desired text.

Phototypesetting or "cold type" systems first appeared in the early 1960s and rapidly displaced continuous casting machines.

These devices consisted of glass or film disks or strips (one per font) that spun in front of a light source to selectively expose characters onto light-sensitive paper.

With the completion of a block of lines the typesetter fed the corresponding paper tapes into a phototypesetting device that mechanically set type outlines printed on glass sheets into place for exposure onto a negative film.

Early minicomputer-based typesetting software introduced in the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Datalogics Pager, Penta, Atex, Miles 33, Xyvision, troff from Bell Labs, and IBM's Script product with CRT terminals, were better able to drive these electromechanical devices, and used text markup languages to describe type and other page formatting information.

These companies performed keyboarding, editing and production of paper or film output, and formed a large component of the graphic arts industry.

In the United States, these companies were located in rural Pennsylvania, New England or the Midwest, where labor was cheap and paper was produced nearby, but still within a few hours' travel time of the major publishing centers.

Improvements in software and hardware, and rapidly lowering costs, popularized desktop publishing and enabled very fine control of typeset results much less expensively than the minicomputer dedicated systems.

They did not, however, have the typographic ability or flexibility required for complicated book layout, graphics, mathematics, or advanced hyphenation and justification rules (H and J).

By 2000, this industry segment had shrunk because publishers were now capable of integrating typesetting and graphic design on their own in-house computers.

The availability of cheap or free fonts made the conversion to do-it-yourself easier, but also opened up a gap between skilled designers and amateurs.

The advent of PostScript, supplemented by the PDF file format, provided a universal method of proofing designs and layouts, readable on major computers and operating systems.

Such engines include Datalogics Pager, Penta, Miles 33's OASYS, Xyvision's XML Professional Publisher, FrameMaker, and Arbortext.

During the mid-1970s, Joe Ossanna, working at Bell Laboratories, wrote the troff typesetting program to drive a Wang C/A/T phototypesetter owned by the Labs; it was later enhanced by Brian Kernighan to support output to different equipment, such as laser printers.

The LaTeX macro package, written by Leslie Lamport at the beginning of the 1980s, offered a simpler interface and an easier way to systematically encode the structure of a document.

These programs include Scientific Workplace and LyX, which are graphical/interactive editors; TeXmacs, while being an independent typesetting system, can also aid the preparation of TeX documents through its export capability.

GNU TeXmacs (whose name is a combination of TeX and Emacs, although it is independent from both of these programs) is a typesetting system which is at the same time a WYSIWYG word processor.

SILE borrows some algorithms from TeX and relies on other libraries such as HarfBuzz and ICU, with an extensible core engine developed in Lua.