Digital typesetting in the context of Composing stick

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”.

Phototypesetting is a method of setting type which uses photography to make columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper.It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing which gave rise to digital typesetting.

The first phototypesetters quickly project light through a film negative of an individual character in a font, then through a lens that magnifies or reduces the size of the character onto photographic paper or film, which is collected on a spool in a light-proof canister. The paper or film is then fed into a processor, a machine that pulls the paper or film strip through two or three baths of chemicals, from which it emerges ready for paste-up or film make-up. Later phototypesetting machines used other methods, such as displaying a digitised character on a CRT screen. The results of this process are then transferred onto printing plates which are used in offset printing.