Typography (from the Greek words (typos) = form and (graphy = writing) is the art and technique of arranging type. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing), adjusting the spaces between groups of letters (tracking) and adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning). Type design is a closely related craft, which some consider distinct and others a part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers.Typography is performed by typesetters, compositors, typographers, graphic designers, art directors, comic book artists, graffiti artists, clerical workers, and anyone else who arranges type for a product. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers and lay users. According to David Jury, "Typography is now something everybody does.
HISTORY OF TYPOGRAPHY- Typography traces its origins to the first punches and dies used to make seals and currency in ancient times. The typographical principle, that is the creation of a complete text by reusing identical characters, was first realized in the Phaistos Disc, an enigmatic Minoan print item from Crete, Greece, which dates between 1850 and 1600 BC. It has been put forward that Roman lead pipe inscriptions were created by movable type printing, but this view has been recently dismissed by the German typographer Herbert Brekle.
The essential criterion of type identity was met by medieval print artifacts such as the Latin Pruefening Abbey inscription of 1119 that was created by the same technique as the Phaistos disc. In the northern Italian town of Cividale, there is a Venetian silver retable from ca. 1200, which was printed with individual letter punches. The same printing technique can apparently be found in 10th to 12th century Byzantine staurotheca and lipsanotheca. Individual letter tiles where the words are formed by assembling single letter tiles in the desired order were reasonably widespread in medieval Northern Europe.
Modern movable type, along with the mechanical printing press, was invented in mid-15th century Europe by the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg. His type pieces from a lead-based alloy suited printing purposes so well that the alloy is still used today. Gutenberg developed specialized techniques for casting and combining cheap copies of letter punches in the vast quantities required to print multiple copies of texts. This technical breakthrough was instrumental in starting the Printing Revolution.
Typography with movable type was separately invented in 11th-century China. Metal type was first invented in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty around 1230. Both hand printing systems, however, were only sporadically used and discontinued after the introduction of Western lead type and the printing press.
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types. Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner. Typesetting is the retrieval of the stored letters (called sorts in mechanical systems and glyphs in digital systems) and the ordering of them according to a language's orthography for visual display.
During the letter press era, moveable type was composed by hand for each page. Cast metal sortswere composited into words and lines of text and tightly bound together to make up a page image called a forme, with all letter faces exactly the same height to form an even surface of type. The forme was mounted in a press, inked, and an impression made on paper.
The diagram at right illustrates a cast metal sort: a face, b body or shank, c point size, 1 shoulder, 2nick, 3 groove, 4 foot. Wooden printing sorts were in use for centuries in combination with metal type.
Copies of formes were cast when anticipating subsequent printings of a text, freeing the costly type for other work. In this process, called stereotyping, the entire forme is pressed into a fine matrix such as plaster of Paris called Flong to create a positive, from which the stereotype forme was cast of type metal.
Hot-metal typesetting
Hand composing was rendered commercially obsolete by continuous casting or hot-metal typesetting machines such as the Linotype machine and Monotype at the end of the 19th century. The Linotype, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler, enabled one machine operator to do the work of ten hand compositors by automating the selection, use and replacement of sorts, with a keyboard as input. Later advances such as the typewriter and computer would push the state of the art even farther ahead. Still, hand composition and letter press printing did not fall completely out of use.
Photo typesetting
Photo typesetting or "cold type" systems first appeared in the early 1960s and rapidly displaced continuous casting machines. These devices consisted of glass disks (one per font) that spun in front of a light source which selectively exposed characters onto light-sensitive paper. Originally they were driven by pre-punched paper tapes. Later they were hooked up to computer front ends.
One of the earliest electronic photocomposition systems was introduced by Fairchild Semiconductor. The typesetter typed a line of text on a Fairchild keyboard that had no display. To verify correct content of the line it was typed a second time. If the two lines were identical a bell rang and the machine produced a punched paper tape corresponding to the text. With the completion of a block of lines the typesetter fed the corresponding paper tapes into a phototypesetting device which mechanically set type outlines printed on glass sheets into place for exposure onto a negative film. Photosensitive paper was exposed to light through the negative film, resulting in a column of black type on white paper, or a galley. The galley was then cut up and used to create a mechanical drawing or paste up of a whole page. A large film negative of the page is shot and used to make plates for offset printing.
DIGITAL TYPESETTING
The next generation of phototypesetting machines to emerge were those that generated characters on a Cathode ray tube. Typical of the type were the Alphanumeric APS2 (1963), IBM 2680 (1967), I.I.I. Video Comp (1973), Linotron 202 (1978), and Auto logic APS5 (1980). These machines were the mainstay of photo typesetting for much of the 1970s and 1980s. Such machines could be 'driven online' by a computer front-end system or take their data from magnetic tape. Type fonts were stored digitally on conventional magnetic disk drives.
Computers excel at automatically typesetting documents. Character-by-character computer-aided photo typesetting was in turn rapidly rendered obsolete in the 1980s by fully digital systems employing a raster image processor to render an entire page to a single high-resolution digital image, now known as image setting.
Typeface
A typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly.
The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design. Designers of typefaces are called type designers, and often typographers. In digital typography, type designers are also known as font developers or font designers. Refer to the list of typographers of notable typographers around the world.
Typeface is the design of glyphs which is the looks of characters. The same glyph may be used for characters from different scripts, e.g. Roman uppercase A usually looks the same as Greek uppercase alpha, and there are typefaces tailored for special applications, such as map-making or astrology and mathematics.
The term typeface is frequently confused with term font or used as a synonym. Before the advent of digital typography and desktop publishing the two terms had a more clearly understood meaning. See font for a complete definition of that term.
A type foundry is a company that designs and/or distributes typefaces. Originally, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Monotype machines designed to be printed on letterpress printers. Today's digital type foundries accumulate and distribute typefaces (typically as digitized fonts) created by type designers, who may either befreelancers operating their own independent foundry, or employed by another foundry. Type foundries may also provide custom type design services.
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