Digital Typesetting

From nowadays’ point of view, it’s surely interesting that the digitization of the letters, what is meaning the splitting-up into small identical elements, has been done during the photo typesetting era. In germany the terms “Lichtsatz” or “Lasersatz” have been in use. A pioneer in this field has been the company Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell GmbH, what was successfully inventing and producing one of the first digital typesetting machines on the market, the Digiset.

A smaller device has been the CRTronic from Linotype, an all-in-one device using a cathode ray tube for exposuring the film. Three other terminals could be combined with the main station. Describing typefaces was realized by using vector curves instead of bitmap information.

In the field of integrating text and images, the Scangraphic company with its ColorCommander systems had great success. Not only high quality typesetting has been possible, there has been functionality for manipulating high resolution color images. One shouldn’t forget that the Macs by this time haven’t been able do to that.

To the end of the photo typesetting era, there have been solutions on the base of Sun workstations of that time, producing PostScript output as well. Overall, digital typesetting systems have been replaced by DTP and PostScript solutions.

From top to bottom:

Linotype CRTronic

Hell Digiset

Autologic APS-5

Scangraphic ColorCommander