Phototypesetting

Phototypesetting is a method of producing printed text by using photography to create the characters and lines that will be printed. It emerged in the 1950s as a replacement for hot metal typesetting and remained prominent through the 1970s and 1980s. In a typical workflow, a compositor entered text on a keyboard or workstation, and the phototypesetter used light to expose photographic images of the requested characters onto film or directly onto printing plates. The resulting film was used to make plates for offset printing.

There are two main forms of phototypesetting: film-based systems, which produced photographic film negatives or positives that were assembled into pages and then used to create printing plates; and image setters, which produced high-resolution film directly from the digital composition for plate production. Fonts, stored as photographic font elements or font libraries, included ligatures and kerning information and could be scaled to different point sizes. The process allowed complex typography, varied leading, and precise justification that were more difficult to achieve with metal type.

Advantages of phototypesetting over traditional metal type included greater speed, the ability to handle larger font sizes, easier font changes, and more flexible layout options. Disadvantages included the need for chemical processing of film and plates, production costs, and the requirement for specialized equipment and operators.

The rise of digital typesetting in the 1980s and 1990s—driven by desktop publishing, page description languages, and digital fonts—led to the decline of phototypesetting. It is now largely obsolete, but it played a crucial role in the transition from physical type to modern electronic typography and influenced subsequent font technologies and workflows.