Type is a letter, number, or other character used in printing. The words and numbers in all printed materials, including books, magazines, and newspapers, are made from type. There are three kinds of type: (1) metal type, (2) photographic type, and (3) digital type.
Metal type, also called hot type, consists of small pieces of metal that have raised letters on top. It is made by machines that force a mixture of molten lead and other metals into matrices (molds) of each character.
Photographic type, also called cold type, consists of photographic images of letters. It may be produced by several kinds of typesetting devices called photocomposition machines. Early photocomposition machines contained a film negative of a font, a set of all the characters of one type style. A beam of light projected through a character on the negative produced a positive of that character on film or photosensitive paper.
Today, a computer stores instructions for forming each character in a font. Linked to the computer is a photocomposition machine that usually contains a laser. Light pulses form the image on photosensitive paper or film, or directly on a printing plate.
Today, the most commonly used type is digital type. Modern printers create type as patterns of dots on paper, film, printing plates, or other material. The resolution (clarity) of the type is expressed as dots per inch (dpi). For example, 1,000 dpi means that on 1 square inch (6.5 square centimeters) of paper there are 1,000 dots across and 1,000 dots down. Each dot is located in a grid called a bitmap or raster and can be turned on or off.
A special computer language defines the shapes of characters using a set of program instructions. Each character is an individual program, and a font is a collection of these programs. All digital fonts are outlines that can be scaled to any size without distorting their shapes. They are then converted to a bitmap. A raster image processor (RIP), which may be either a computer program or a separate machine, processes digital fonts. It produces instructions that allow the characters to be either displayed on a computer monitor or printed. Because a monitor and a printer generally have different resolutions, they require different bitmap patterns. The RIP creates the required bitmap grid for the monitor or printer and forms the characters by turning the dot at each bitmap position on or off.
Type is made in many sizes and thousands of styles. Each style, called a type face, has its own characteristics. Virtually all type faces are available in digital form.
Classes of type.
There are four general classes of type styles. They are (1) roman, (2) sans-serif, (3) script, and (4) italic.
Roman types
have small finishing strokes called serifs that extend from the main strokes of the letters. These types include the most commonly used styles. Printers use roman types for books, magazines, and newspapers. Popular roman styles include Baskerville, Bodoni, Garamond, and Times Roman.
Roman types include a few designs called black letter and a few called uncial. Black letter designs have highly decorative letters with thick, heavy lines. The first European printing type was black letter. Uncial designs are based on a letter style that was popular from the A.D. 300’s to 700’s. They were first produced in type in the 1900’s. Most uncial letters look like rounded capitals. The first roman-style type similar to the ones used today was perfected about 1470 by a French printer named Nicolas Jenson.
Sans-serif types
have no serifs. Sans is a French word that means without. Sans-serif styles are often used for advertisements, headings, and texts. Popular styles of this class include Futura, Helvetica, and Univers. William Caslon IV, a British printer, made the first sans-serif type about 1816.
Script types
resemble handwriting. The lower-case (small) letters of many script styles are joined together. This class is widely used in advertising. Script types include such styles as Bank Script, Brush, and Kaufmann. The first script styles were produced in the mid-1500’s.
Italic types
have slanted letters that look like this. Italics are often used to emphasize a word or a group of words. Most italic types are designed to accompany a roman or sans-serif type. The titles of many books, magazines, and newspapers are printed in italics. This class includes such styles as Baskerville Italic and Futura Italic. Aldus Manutius, an Italian printer, developed the first italic type with Francesco Griffo, an Italian metalsmith, in 1500.
Sizes of type.
Printers in some countries, including Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States, use a special scale to measure the size of type and the length of lines of type. This scale is called the American Point System. One point on the scale equals 0.013837 inch (0.3514598 millimeter). One inch (2.5 centimeters) equals about 72 points. One pica equals 12 points. In some European countries, including France, Germany, and Italy, type is measured by the Didot point. This point is slightly larger than the American point.
The point size of type refers to the height of the characters. The height of the main part of a small letter is called the x-height. Such letters as a, c, e, and x have only an x-height, but others have strokes that extend above or below the x-height. Letters with ascenders include b, d, and f. Letters with descenders include g, j, and p. The point size of any type is the distance from the top of the ascenders to the bottom of the descenders. It may include a slight space above the ascenders or below the descenders.
Metal type ranges in size from 4 point to 120 point. Most styles are not made in all sizes, however. The most common sizes include those from 6 point to 72 point.
A majority of photographic type is made in only a few small sizes. A font can be enlarged or reduced to other type sizes by lenses in the photographic equipment. In digital composition, instructions for enlarging or reducing type size are stored in the computer.
History.
Until the 1400’s, most books were produced by people who copied them by hand. About 1440, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg made the first use in Europe of movable type. Movable type consists of a piece of type for each character. It had been invented about 1045 by Bi Sheng, a Chinese printer, but this invention had not spread to Europe. See Book (History) .
For about 400 years, printers set (assembled) all type by hand. In the 1880’s, Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German instrument maker, invented the Linotype. This machine set type mechanically, eliminating the need for hand setting and increasing the speed of typesetting. In 1887, an American inventor named Tolbert Lanston developed a machine called the Monotype, which cast individual pieces of type and set them into lines. Printers still use Linotype and Monotype machines. See Linotype .
One of the first commercially practical machines to produce and set photographic type was invented in the 1940’s. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, engineers developed new phototypesetting machines that set type much faster than the earlier kinds. Such machines are linked to powerful computers that can handle many different tasks formerly performed by people. For example, the computers tell the machine how to justify lines of type—that is, make them the right length—and how to hyphenate words. In the 1990’s, digital type became the most widely used kind of type.
