The Journey of Digital Type

Carl Shank • June 13, 2021

It all started with Gutenberg. Johannes Gutenberg’s 42–line Bible unleashed a typesetting revolution transforming movable type into today’s digitized computer formats. The printing press, Gutenberg, and the Bible have all played a primary role in the type you see everyday. As a matter of fact, Gutenberg could be credited with the printing "reformation." Movable type, that is, individual pieces of type for each letter, had been used by the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese. Yet, Johannes Gutenberg’s work stands out in both art and printing history as the first exquisitely, practically produced print job.


Type styles the reflected the scribal penchant for bold, heavy script letters. As art and technology grew together, the “modern” style developed with serifs and contrasting thick and thin strokes, such as seen in Adobe's Caslon Pro font — ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890.  With the nineteenth century, and the Industrial Revolution, Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype (1886) introduced mechanical typesetting through the use of a keyboard control device. More styles of type followed for the growing business of mercantile advertising. Most of these typefaces followed the “serif” style, but the Bauhaus Design School in Germany, as well as the Art Deco style, gave us “sans serif” faces, such as the ever popular Helvetica. Designed by Max Miedinger in 1956 — ABCDEFGHIJKLMabcdefghijklm1234567890. Helvetica can be seen on road and street signs. It was later included as one of the first Apple LaserWriter fonts.


Individual letters of type striking paper through an inked ribbon took hold as the typewriter flooded the business market. But, the letters were monospaced, uninteresting, and unequalled to the printed page. In seeing the importance of typefaces as communication, IBM introduced the IBM Executive typewriter in 1954. Now the office typist could use special fonts and even true proportional spacing. The copy also looked much better than the traditional typewritten efforts.


Another step toward professional typesetting came in 1961 when IBM came up with the Selectric and a variety of interchangeable type balls. The IBM Selectric Composer became the typesetter of choice. Text was typed onto a magnetic roll of tape and the roll was then placed in the Composer, a key pressed and there it was—justified, book-like text that looked really sharp! But, the font choices were severely limited and the Composer only produced certain limited sizes of type. Headlines and other display faces had to be set differently.


Through the efforts of Rene Higonnet and Louis Moyroud in 1949, their machine, the Photon, helped push typesetting toward photocomposition. This electronic method of setting type directly on light sensitive paper started the “cold” typesetting revolution. Faster and more flexible than all previous technologies, photocomposition freed typesetters from the physical limitations imposed by hot-metal type processes.


Digital phototypesetters introduced in 1972 projected letterforms onto a CRT (cathode ray tube). This type image was then flashed onto photosensitive paper. Soon the electron beam was turned on a drum generating an electrostatic charge. Toner particles, attracted to the charged areas, were fused onto paper by heat. Dry typesetting had begun, and the laser printer was born.


Apple Computer, in its development of the Macintosh computer in the early 80’s, also introduced the Apple LaserWriter™ and the LaserWriter Plus. Using a new tech-nology called “Postscript,” licensed from Adobe Systems, a built-in font description language in the Laser-Writer’s ROM (read-only memory) converted screen fonts on the computer screen, through a mathematical process, to 300 dpi (dots-per-inch) output.


Users wanted, and soon got, true WYSIWYG (pronounced wizzy-wig— what-you-see-is-what-you-get) operating environments. With the advent of Adobe’s ATM (Adobe Type Manager™), and Apple’s TrueType fonts, the on screen font “jaggies” were replaced by the outline representation of the font, so that the screen faithfully represented the final printed output. Fonts could be “downloaded” per job to the Post-script printer, even if the printer did not have the specified fonts inherent in its ROM files.


“QuickDraw” gave the added advantage of producing laser-like output even from a nonPostscript printer. With QuickDraw, the font outlines are processed by the computer and sent to the printer for output. Software packages now skew, bend, shrink, condense, expand, rotate and manipulate typeforms.

Apple’s System 7.x and Windows 3.1x included several TrueType fonts that were installed with the system software. What a journey to digitized type—and it’s not over, as indicated in other blogs on this site.

Successful Layout & Design

Compositors & Type: Origin and Use of “Uppercase” and “Lowercase”

By Carl Shank • June 13, 2026
Compositors & Type: Origin and Use of “Uppercase” and “Lowercase” Carl Shank, CARE Typography Most everyone knows what “uppercase” and “lowercase” letters are. They refer, of course, to our “capital” letters and our “regular” small print. But not many know why or how they came to be known by such terminology. The answer is found in the history and development of typography and printing. “Case” here doesn’t refer to “circumstance” or “condition.” It refers to the wooden trays used to store metal letters, the top case for capital letters (“uppercase”) and the lower case for small letters. Each tray was divided into compartments to hold the type. The lower case also held the punctuation marks and other pieces of type, like “spacers.” The type case was a shallow wooden tray divided into compartments of various sizes. There were about thirty styles of type cases, and some of these were made in different sizes.[1] The most common, or standard, size was 32¼ by 16 inches, outside dimensions, and ⅛ inches deep, inside. One of three traditional plans or schemes for such type cases involved (1) all characters in one case; (2) capitals, small capitals and a few other characters in one case; or (3) the small letters, figures, points, spaces and quads in another case. The two latter cases formed a pair and would nearly always be used together.(See Images) Hand compositors (or “swifts”) would take individual letters, spaces and punctuation marks or other characters from the type case and place them in what was called a composing “stick” in such a manner that when the type characters are properly assembled, they form words, sentences and paragraphs. The work of the press room compositor was divided into two fundamental operations — the “setting” of type and the “unsetting” of type. The former was called composition and the latter, distribution. A visual example of such typesetting can be seen in some of the episodes of The Waltons, an American historical dramatelevision series about a family in rural western Virginia in the Appalachian/Blue Ridge mountains chain, during the economic hardships and mass unemployment of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the subsequent United State home front during World War II in the 1940s. The series aired from 1972 to 1981. John-Boy, a leading character of the series, opened a print shop in a shed by the family home with an old-fashioned mechanical printer that required setting cold metal type from a type case. His brother was the compositor while John-Boy ran the printing machine.

Vanity Type

By Carl Shank • June 6, 2026
Reading through an old volume of Frederick Nelson Phillips, Inc, Type Faces:With Which We 'Prove It With Proofs' in Typography for Advertisements (New York, 1924), I came across some type that falls outside of the standard typography models, called "vanity type." The term “vanity typography” is not a formal category in typographic history like Old Style, Transitional, Modern, or Sans Serif. Designers typically use the phrase informally to describe typography that draws attention primarily to itself rather than serving the text or reader. Vanity typography occurs when type is used as a display of the designer's skill, fashion, or personal taste rather than to improve communication. Readability is sometimes sacrificed for self-expression and artistic flair. Such type styles use excessive ornamentation, decorative letterforms, overuse of effects like shadows, outlines, gradients and distortions, unusual spacing, and generally typography used to impress rather than inform. Notice in the sample by Phillips, the different "A's," "F's,", "G's," "H's," "L's," "M's," "S's," T's" and "W's." This is not calligraphy lettering, but rather type that could have been used for verses or opening letters to paragraphs or stories.
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