Typesetting Tutorial: "Learning to Set Type" 1959 Whitten-Appleton

more at http://quickfound.net/

DEMONSTRATES BASIC PRINCIPLES OF TYPESETTING & DISTRIBUTION. STRESSES CORRECT WAYS OF MANIPULATING THE TYPE, "SPOTTING" LETTERS BEFORE THEY ARE CHOSEN, & THE IMPORTANCE OF FOLLOWING COPY & CORRECTING ERRORS.

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typesetting

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents. Stored letters and other symbols (called sorts in mechanical systems and glyphs in digital systems) are retrieved and ordered according to a language's orthography for visual display. Typesetting requires one or more fonts (which are widely but erroneously confused with and substituted for typefaces). One significant effect of typesetting was that authorship of works could be spotted more easily, making it difficult for copiers who have not gained permission...

Manual typesetting

During much of the letterpress era, movable type was composed by hand for each page. Cast metal sorts were composed into words, then lines, then paragraphs, then pages of text and tightly bound together to make up a form, with all letter faces exactly the same "height to paper", creating an even surface of type. The form was placed in a press, inked, and an impression made on paper...

In order to extend the working life of type, and to account for the finite sorts in a case of type, copies of forms were cast when anticipating subsequent printings of a text, freeing the costly type for other work. This was particularly prevalent in book and newspaper work where rotary presses required type forms to wrap an impression cylinder rather than set in the bed of a press. In this process, called stereotyping, the entire form is pressed into a fine matrix such as plaster of Paris or papier mâché called a flong to create a positive, from which the stereotype form was electrotyped, cast of type metal.

Advances such as the typewriter and computer would push the state of the art even farther ahead. Still, hand composition and letterpress printing have not fallen completely out of use, and since the introduction of digital typesetting, it has seen a revival as an artisanal pursuit. However, it is a very small niche within the larger typesetting market.

Hot metal typesetting

The time and effort required to manually compose the text led to several efforts in the 19th century to produce mechanical typesetting. While some, such as the Paige compositor, met with limited success, by the end of the 19th century, several methods had been devised whereby an operator working a keyboard or other devices could produce the desired text. Most of the successful systems involved the in-house casting of the type to be used, hence are termed "hot metal" typesetting. The Linotype machine, invented in 1884, used a keyboard to assemble the casting matrices, and cast an entire line of type at a time (hence its name). In the Monotype System, a keyboard was used to punch a paper tape, which was then fed to control a casting machine. The Ludlow Typograph involved hand-set matrices, but otherwise used hot metal. By the early 20th century, the various systems were nearly universal in large newspapers and publishing houses...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type