Composing stick in the context of Typesetter

Movable type (US English; moveable type in British English) is the system and technology of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document (usually individual alphanumeric characters or punctuation marks) usually on the medium of paper.

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spacing, and spaces between pairs of letters. The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. Typography also may be used as an ornamental and decorative device, unrelated to the communication of information.

Typography is also the work of graphic designers, art directors, manga artists, comic book artists, and, now, anyone who arranges words, letters, numbers, and symbols for publication, display, or distribution, from clerical workers and newsletter writers to anyone self-publishing materials. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Personal computers opened up typography to new generations of previously unrelated designers and lay users. As the capability to create typography has become ubiquitous, the application of principles and best practices developed over generations of skilled workers and professionals has diminished.

In physical typesetting, a sort or type is a block with a typographic character etched on it, used—when lined up with others—to print text. In movable-type printing, the sort or type is cast from a matrix mold and assembled by hand with other sorts bearing additional characters into lines of type to make up a form, from which a page is printed.

Typesetting is the composition of text for publication, display, or distribution by means of arranging physical type (or sort) in mechanical systems or glyphs in digital systems representing characters (letters and other symbols). Stored types are retrieved and ordered according to a language's orthography for visual display. Typesetting requires one or more fonts (which are widely but erroneously confused with and substituted for typefaces).

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.

In typography, leading (/ˈlɛdɪŋ/ LED-ing) is the space between adjacent lines of type; the exact definition varies.

In hand typesetting, leading is the thin strips of lead (or aluminium) that were inserted between lines of type in the composing stick to increase the vertical distance between them. The thickness of the strip is called leading and is equal to the difference between the size of the type and the distance from one baseline to the next. For instance, given a type size of 10 points and a distance between baselines of 12 points, the leading would be 2 points. This combination of type size and distance between baselines is described as "10 on 12 pt", which may appear in a book's colophon as "Typeset in 10 on 12 pt Times Roman", or similar.

The Linotype machine (/ˈlaɪnətaɪp/ LYNE-ə-type) is a "line casting" machine used in printing which is manufactured and sold by the former Mergenthaler Linotype Company and related companies. It was a hot metal typesetting system that cast lines of metal type. Linotype became one of the mainstays for typesetting, especially small-size body text for newspapers, magazines, and advertisements from the late 19th century to the 1970s and 1980s, when it was largely replaced by phototypesetting and then digital typesetting.

The name of the machine comes from producing an entire line of metal type at once, hence a line-o’-type. It was a significant improvement over the previous industry standard of letter-by-letter manual hand composition using a composing stick and shallow subdivided trays, called “cases”.

In typesetting, a slug is any of several kinds of piece of lead or other type metal. One kind of slug is a piece of spacing material used to space paragraphs. In the era of commercial typesetting in metal type, they were usually manufactured in strips of 6-point lead. Another kind of slug is a single sort, bearing a single letter or any other symbol. More recently, a slug can be an entire line of Linotype typeset matter, where a single piece of lead has been cast bearing a line of text.

In modern typesetting programs such as Adobe InDesign, slugs hold printing information, customized color bar information, or display other instructions and descriptions for other information in the document. Objects (including text frames) positioned in the slug area are printed but will disappear when the document is trimmed to its final page size.

A California job case is a kind of type case: a compartmentalized wooden box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing. It was the most popular and accepted of the job case designs in America. The California job case took its name from the Pacific Coast location of the foundries that made the case popular.

The defining characteristic of the California job case is the layout, documented by J. L. Ringwalt in the American Encyclopaedia of Printing in 1871, as used by San Francisco printers. This modification of a previously popular case, the Italic, it was claimed reduced the compositor's hand travel as he set the pieces of type into his composing stick by more than half a mile per day.In the previous convention, upper- and lowercase type were kept in separate cases, or trays. This is why capital letters are called uppercase and the minuscules are lowercase. The combined case became popular during the western expansion of the United States in the 19th century.