Linotype machine in the context of Printing plate

Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The earliest known form of printing evolved from ink rubbings made on paper or cloth from texts on stone tablets, used during the sixth century. Printing by pressing an inked image onto paper (using woodblock printing) appeared later that century. Later developments in printing technology include the movable type invented by Bi Sheng around 1040 and the printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century. The technology of printing played a key role in the development of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.

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 type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Monotype, for letterpress printers. Today's digital type foundries accumulate and distribute typefaces (typically as digitized fonts) created by type designers, who may either be freelancers operating their own independent foundry, or employed by a foundry. Type foundries may also provide custom type design services.

The Mergenthaler Linotype Company was a company founded in the United States in 1886 to market the Linotype machine (/ˈlaɪnəˌtaɪp, -noʊ-/), a system to cast metal type in lines (linecaster) invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. It became the world's leading manufacturer of newspaper and book typesetting equipment. Its main competitor was the American Intertype Corporation and the British-American Monotype Corporation.

Starting in the late 1950s, the Mergenthaler Linotype Company became a major supplier of phototypesetting equipment which included laser typesetters, raster image processors, scanners, and typesetting computers.

The Monotype system is a system for printing by hot-metal typesetting from a keyboard. The two most significant differences from the competing Linotype machine are that

• it is divided into two machines, the Monotype keyboard and the Monotype caster, which communicate by perforated paper tape. It is not necessary to have the same number of each machine.
• the Monotype caster casts individual letters, which are assembled into lines in a fashion similar to classical movable type. This requires a more complex high-speed water-cooled casting mold, but only requires one matrix per possible character.

A Monotype operator enters text on a Monotype keyboard, on which characters are arranged in the QWERTY arrangement of a conventional typewriter, but with this arrangement repeated multiple times. Thus, the typesetter moves his hands from one group of keys to another to type uppercase or lowercase, small capitals, italic uppercase or italic lowercase, and so on.