Digitizing the letterform

The process of digitizing the letters happened in an early state of development in photo typesetting. The first fully digitized typesetting system has been the “Digiset”, invented by Hell in Kiel, Germany. The system was presented in 1965. For the first time, a letter has been built up upon litte spots. The available fonts have been quite rough in resolution and were stored as bitmaps, not as bézier curves or vectors. Every letter was activated point by point from out of the memory and put together to the whole black and white page containing pictures too.

A mnemotechnical code was used to build up the page, somewhat similar to HTML. For example, a command like “dz12” was used to set the leading between lines, “sg9” meant a point size of 9. With this method, complete newspaper pages were generated, processed in the mainframe computer and after that send to the output device.

The first version of “Digiset” contained a cathod ray tube (CRT). In the device, using 3 m of space, there has been a lense of 30 cm circuit in it, hold on rows, strong as an arm. Later, introduced with the legendary LS 210, a laser set the little spots to describe letter forms and raster images.

From top to bottom:

Hell Digiset

Mirror head of laser unit