From the beginning, the process of
producing type was physical; painted, inked, and carved. Today, however, our
digital media present us with many choices for producing typography that end up
on virtual or physical form. The four major technological advances leading to
our current state of affairs were: hand typesetting- metal and wood, machine
typesetting- hot type, phototypesetting- cold type, and digital typesetting- room-temperature
type.
Hand typesetting- metal and wood: the Gutenberg
Bible was the first complete book to be printed in Europe using movable type
made of hand-cast metal. This meant composing large bodies of text and
reproducing print matter in high volume on a letter press endured through to
the late 18th century. As the demand for printed material increased
across Europe and the Americas during the Enlightenment, type design, printing,
and paper-production methods evolved—sometimes toward refinement, sometimes
toward efficiency.
Machine typesetting- hot type: two
late 19th century inventions automated the process of typesetting
and increased its speed, which in turn affected type design. The pantographic
punch-cutter (1884), coupled with the revolutionary Mergenthaler Linotype and
Lanston Monotype casting machines (1884/86), shifted mass production of metal
type from being labor-intensive hand processes to mechanically assisted ones.
Phototypesetting- cold type: phototypesetting
quickly dominated the graphic industry in the 1960s, sporting names that referred
to the new electronic age: Diatype, Compugraphic, PhotoTypositor, and Varityper.
These machines moved type composition from the metal chase to the drafting
table. Typesetting now had very few limitations and photocomposition methods
became the professional standard.
Digital typesetting- room-temperature
type: it began with desktop publishing, PostScript programming language,
publishing software, and laser printing. Never before have typefaces been so
precisely (or so undiscriminatingly) drawn, nor as widely distributed.
Then there is the hot-to-cold,
stone-to-pixel life of Trajan. Roman capitals were carved in stone on the
original column, and have been imitated on stately buildings ever since. They have
been hand-lettered, cast in metal, and redrawn for photo- and digital
typesetting. Square capitals were the first to have serifs as we know them
today. A ubiquitous, and perhaps the most respected, version of Trajan today is
the only typeface that claims the Trajan name and is now included in Apple’s
system fonts.
