Heric says the outstanding development of new desktop publishing has a lot to do with the old school typographers
I remember my university classes, composing newspaper copy with waxed text galleys and camera-screened halftones to be shot on a camera. Coming up with those text galleys was a difficult task, that took years of expertise to understand that subtle professional finesse that typesetting required. I am not just talking about those who knew the difference between an em-dash and an umlaut, I am talking about those professionals whom understood type ‘colour’ and the interplay between decenders, serifs, stem-weights, and ascenders. These people could hand position (with the venerable photo-typositor by VGC) type in columns for eventual galley output onto RC paper. To watch this process showed the art that was photo typesetting. These guys were blindingly fast, and could set galleys of type turning a dial and hitting the foot-pedal of the exposure so fast it was as if typing. They were artisans, and photo-typesetting from the ‘70s and ‘80s reflects it. In the early to mid 1980’s however, things began to become automated.The Atex Systems, the Linotype CORA and Agfa Compugraphic were the cornerstones of any pre-PostScript typography facility that wanted to get modern. These systems allowed (in an admittedly cumbersome means) for computerised typesetting, without a true wysiwyg interface, and a proprietary coding language. It may sound crazy to learn complex codes to specify a font to be say Garamond Bold Italic 12 points over 12.5 point leading, but that was the reality before the advent of the desktop, and its impact for better or worse on typesetting. This was still a vast improvement in productivity, and was as revolutionary as the word processor was to typists. Being able to store text and documents, and not having to start over if a mistake was made, made these systems ubiquitous amongst publishers and prepress facilities in the early 1980s. These systems still paid a great deal of time and attention to the details of typesetting, and worked very hard to build a semblance of the quality of hand-set type. Kerning tables, and Hyphenation and Justification Dictionaries were used in proprietary formats by early electronic typesetting vendors, and they did a good job of mimicking hand-set type.
Enter the Desktop. When the desktop made its initial splash with the introduction of the Macintosh, and eventual PostScript output devices from the Apple LaserWriter to the Linotype L-100/300, people were more impressed that you could do something on a computer, that did not look as though it was done on a computer. All of a sudden, an investment of $6,000-$10,000 was enough to allow people to set type. This was orders of magnitude more cost effective than the proprietary, but more professional systems available, and also infinitely more easy to use. Programs like “Ready, Set, Go...”, Pagemaker, and Quark XPress, paved a road towards the desktop publishing revolution, with one small caveat. The resolution was fine, and the ability to lay out pages in wysiwyg was outstanding, but if an experienced typographer looked at the output from these devices, they were not impressed. Often, type would not look right, and obvious spacing and kerning/leading issues were common complaints. The early software knew a lot about how to make computers print, but not a lot about how to make professionally formatted text.
Two steps forward, one step back... While a lay-person could not look at first-generation PostScript typesetting, and see anything wrong with it, a professional typographer would mercilessly poke holes and find flaw with anything that the Mac Department was responsible for.
This discrepancy in quality caused a rift between the two camps of graphic production, between the old-school professionals, and the desktop toys and their tinkerers. The software applications and their programmers admittedly had a lot to learn about typography, and the old schoolers had a lot to learn about computers. This rift also built a fire under the software developers however, and the procedures and methods for maintaining high-quality type-color were developed and implemented by these developers. New font formats with esoteric technologies such as hinting and software with H and J dictionaries and Kerning Pairs began to zero in on the discrepancy between the two camps, and the differences began to fade.
It was about a 10 year growth process for the desktop applications to properly implement professional typesetting into their platforms, and in that time, the quality of desktop production increased tremendously due to screen algorithms, separation engines, and output devices.
Modern desktop applications have outstanding capabilities in typography and their professionalism means that even the lay-person is capable of professional typesetting. This is good, it empowers the new trainee and production worker to benefit from the years of expertise of type-professionals worked hard to maintain. While it may seem as though the old-school type fanatics who trashed the early desktop solutions were curmudgeonly, it is because of their tenacity that we have professional type on the desktop, rather than the industry just accepting sub-par typesetting in the name of automation. While I love my computers, and the amazing things they are capable of, I have long admired the hundreds of years of print professionals whom we stand on the shoulders of now. I chuckle to myself at how easy it is to make changes to whole documents in a second, that would have amounted to literal months of hard work by a trained professional typographer. We owe a lot to the early pioneers of desktop publishing who adhered to a quality standard, and refused to let a new technology lower the bar of acceptability to our industry. Fonts may still be the cause of most print-job errors or issues, but we can thank the curmudgeons for making our results look as good as hand-set type. The next time you see XPress, or InDesign automatically kern a pair of characters together due to the nature of their combination, thank the old-schoolers, and their insistence that the computer needed to be refined in order to not take that step backward in quality. I appreciate it, and I hope
you do as well.
