Composing/Composition

Composition is the process of composing (creating and arranging) type for printing, that is, the letters, numerals, punctuation marks, and other symbols that are used to create written text that appears in a printed publication. Today, it includes text created on computer software and as it appears on the Internet and its World Wide Web. Type was assembled by hand for about 400 years after Johannes Gutenberg invented a printing press in about 1440 that used movable type to print ink on paper. While some 19th-century inventions preceded the typesetting machine that Ottmar Mergenthaler invented in 1886, his Linotype was the first that was suitable for commercial use.

Other metal-casting typesetting machines soon followed that also created raised (i.e., relief) metal “hot type” that was needed for letterpress printing, for example, the Intertype and the Ludlow, both of which also cast one-piece fully spaced lines; and the Monotype, which cast individual type characters in justified lines. While such innovations were a remarkable improvement over the tedious hand composition of individual type characters, the type compositors who used these typesetting machines were nevertheless laboriously slow compared to today's typesetters who simply use a computer keyboard to set type for offset lithography (planographic) printing—at the normal speed of creating any other type of document on a computer. Indeed, anyone today who does desktop publishing could be considered a type compositor, albeit one lacking in the skills the craft required in past generations of printing technology.

As opposed to the creation of cast-metal hot type, a cold-type process evolved in the mid-20th century that ranged from “strike-on” machines that were similar to electric typewriters of that era, which evolved into the far more sophisticated photocomposition machines that produced type on film and transferred this type directly onto a printing plate. Such cold-type could be used in offset lithography (planographic) printing, which newspapers began using as early as the late 1930s but which became common among even the largest-circulation dailies in the late 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, for their own job-printing needs, public relations practitioners still bought typesetting from those offering photocomposition services (oftentimes the same companies that would do the printing) until the past quarter century or so, when direct computer links to printers made this specific skill obsolete.

To fully appreciate the evolution of type composition and the skills of the type compositors of an earlier era, the practitioner must study the whole process of printing, which is changing rapidly today—more so than it has in the 51/2 centuries since Gutenberg's press began using hand-assembled movable type. Just as was the case with their long-dead predecessors who could rapidly assemble hand-set type, those type compositors who composed type using the Linotype and similar machines of an earlier era—with their large keyboards or other mechanical type selection methods that differed greatly from today's computer keyboards—are a disappearing breed. The few remaining Linotype compositors might only operate such machines at a history pavilion for the entertainment of those attending a state fair, in remote areas of lesser-developed countries, among religious sects that eschew today's technology. Nevertheless, the mystique of this highly skilled craft of the type compositor will never be known by those who today compose type for printing on their computer keyboards.

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