Professional Transcribing, Typesetting, Digital Design and more!

Posts Tagged ‘typewriter’

Printing and printing processes over the years have come along way.  Today’s technology makes things more efficient, faster and easier for those who wish to accomplish the task of printing magazines, newspapers and more, but it hasn’t always been such a simple task.

Wood blocks were the original innovation. Pages of books were carved into them and then in turn those ‘plates’ were used to produce multiple copies of that item.

With the knowledge of metal and it’s qualities, metal came into play around the middle of the 15th Century.  Every heard of Guetenberg’s Bible?  This was one of the first publications produced from Guetenberg’s invention of the movable blocks of typeface that produced a more efficient page being able to utilize that one particular letter in more than one place producing a vast number of combinations. Boxes were laid out with blank typeface blocks used for spaces and once completed you saw a reverse image of what was to be printed.

Years later, machines took over giving mass production a whole new look.  Machines, similar to a typewriter, would inlay a type in which a mold was manufactured.  This  later involved a Teletype writer punched tape which could be used with the Linotypesetter which eliminated the need for human involvement in typesetting the lines by hand.

Photo-mechanical composition moved the mechanical era up a notch providing the use of one drum to produce a multiple element in sizes of type.  As the drum spun, flashes of light located a particular character and placed it it’s desired place at which point the drum then moved to the next line to get the desired typeset story.

In the early 1960′s, Cathode Ray Tube typesetting made the technology world peek it’s head in to see what was possible.  Using codes for the type, size and placement of the text making this the first attempt at computerizing the information to typeset printed matter.  Machines of this time were as large as a bedroom and sometimes it took more than one of these machines to hold just a small bit of data only to place it on magnetic strip for later use. Justification, leading, hyphenation also become a variable that we could start to play with.

As technology progressed and laser’s were shrunk to fit into laser printers, photocopiers and fax machines, we have found what we have today in hundreds of thousands of offices all over the world.  Giving even more variables such as printing photographs, utilizing foreign fonts and of course, producing crisp and readable elements at any size.

Because of the advancements in technology, equipment, materials and knowledge of the typesetter, papers that took days to do in wood block probably now only take minutes giving you the client the ability to make changes and give us, the typesetter versatility and speed.