Before I started using Mac computers with fonts we used to use typesetting services to generate type for layouts. I believe the systems were called phototypesetting. I watched a few times in and around 1979-1980. There appeared to be a computer style keyboard & monitor, a device that looked like a computer and a big image setter. And, paper tapes taped to the walls. I assumed that was their version of a floppy disk.
Did those systems use fonts like we use now? Were they digital files? Who designed those fonts and what kind of equipment did they use?
0
Comments
The predominant phototypesetting machines used film or glass negatives for the fonts. Some were disks (A/M), some were long strips wrapped around a drum (Compugraphic), some were rectangular (Linotype and Berthold).
I don't know the details of how the fonts were made, but as far as I know they were made in-house at the manufacturer of the typesetting machines.
I used both A/M and Compugraphic phototypesetters in the late seventies/early eighties. 8-inch floppy drives were an option (you could get them without drives).
The floppies for those systems were for storing "keystrokes". That is, you could open a file before you started typing a job and all the keystrokes—command and characters—would be saved to disk so you could save a job without outputting it, re-run a job, or edit it like on a word processor.
On the machines without drives, each line was sent to the output unit immediately when you hit "return" and was gone forever, although you could edit the line before you hit "return". This also meant that you had to make hyphenation decisions manually—the machine would indicate when you were getting close to the end of a line and highlight the part of the line that overflowed the line-length, so you could pick a spot to put the hyphen.
I saw a Linofilm system once that had paper tapes. These were used similar to the way floppies were used to "save keystrokes" so you could re-run jobs. I think some people learned how to read the codes on them so they could cut out sections containing mistakes, for instance.
Display phototype was kerned by the typesetter’s eye. Although there were guide marks for a default setting, if the spec was for “tight not touching”, the kerning (if it could be thus termed) was entirely at the operator’s discretion.
Another difference: although nowadays art directors and graphic designers can adjust kerning in layout apps, it was difficult for us to do that back then, involving parallel cutting, with a scalpel/x-acto blade, between waxed lines of type, then between letters, peeling them up and shifting them along the parallel-cut “tracks” we’d made. I also recall extensively re-flowing text, especially for wrap-arounds of close-cut images. That might even be called “typesetting” too!
The way it worked, I would enter the dimensions of the art or photo (original) in picas, the amount of space available on the page (that is, minus the text), the type information (line spacing, line length, and number of columns). It would then give the line length(s) for the run-around area and how many lines deep it should be, as well as some other info.
I remember exactly where I got this idea—from an issue of Industrial Art Methods (which I've written about here):