The Obituary
Phototypesetting replaced hot metal with light. Emerging around 1949-1950 with machines like the Intertype Fotosetter and the Lumitype, it stored each character as a small photographic image — on a spinning disc, drum, or film strip — and flashed it through a lens onto light-sensitive paper or film. The exposed sheets were developed and pasted up into pages. Without molten lead, type could be enlarged, condensed, and overlapped freely, and composing rooms grew quieter and cleaner. It reigned from the 1960s into the 1980s, then desktop publishing put the whole process inside a personal computer driving a digital imagesetter, and the photographic machines were retired.
Worth remembering
- Early units flashed type through a spinning disc or film strip of character images onto light-sensitive paper.
- It freed designers from fixed metal sizes — type could be scaled and overlapped on film.
Sources
- Phototypesetting projected characters onto photographic film or paper Wikipedia
- Phototypesetting replaced hot-metal type and was itself replaced by digital DTP Britannica
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.