Electronic age hits the letterpress

Press, 31 March 1983, Page 26

Electronic age hits the letterpress

The words you are reading were formed on these lines by beams of electrons — because an electronic photo-setter and three computers sort, shift, and finally make the image of every word that appears in “The Press.” Letterpress printing entailed hand-setting of lines of type or the use of typesetting machines, such as the Linotype, with pots of molten lead, casting lines one at a time to the commands of an operator at a keyboard. The electronic age touched letterpress printing with the introduction of Comet linesetters, which were fed instructions by coded paper tape. The words to be printed were punched on to the tape by fast typists, and the tape was run through a computer which added coding to justify lines. Justification is the spacing of words so that as many lines as possible finish at the end of a word. Those that do not break at the end must then be hyphenated at a point that makes for easy reading. Late in 1980, “The Press” installed its ?2M computer and typesetting system. The “engines” for the system are two large minicomputers by the Digital Equipment Corporation, the world’s second largest computer company, after IBM. The two machines are connected by a high-speed link so that anything done by one computer is transferred to the other (for back-up purposes in case of a breakdown).

Each can support 48 terminals, but at present they jointly support only 40 — 20 for the keying in of editorial matter, and 20 for keying in advertising.

These are not unlike other DEC computers used in business, but they use special software (sets of programs) developed in decades of man-years by programmers in America. These allow the computer to follow instructions from the sub-editors about column width, paragraph indentation, capitalisation, and other details. The editorial material is entered in the computer by keyboard operators. They instruct the computer to provide a copy of the story from a fast line-printer, and this is checked by proofreaders against the reporter’s sub-edited copy. The operator then recalls the story from the computer’s memory to the visual display screen, and with the help of a flashing cursor that enables each letter to be changed, amends the story.

The story on the screen will have been justified by the computer. This is a very complex task, and perhaps no computer will ever be able to match the human brain in this task. The reason is that machines

work to logic, and human languages are built up of so many exceptions, and so many nuances of a sublogical or supra-logical nature. Computers can be taught some rules about where to break words at the end of the line, by recognising, for example, that a syllable usually comprises a vowel between two consonants. And for an exception, the computer has its own dictionary, built up gradually by its operators. This exception dictionary at present contains about 8000 words. When justifying, the computer, if it needs to break a word at the end of a line, first compares it with those in the dictionary to see if there are any exception rules. If not it applies “logic rules.” Despite this, it may still have trouble with words such as, perhaps, illustrate, abacus, bureau, residual, and sympathy. The computers obviously need a solid store of memory, and they have each one Megabyte (a million bytes) of built-in memory. In addition, they share four discs, each of which has 67 Megabytes of memory. Each of these discs could, for example, store the contents of about 20 issues of “The Press.” In the memory the stories are “parked” on the discs in specific sectors, or spots. A file specification, or label, given to each story, is entered in an index of each disc, and can be readily called up for alteration, or if corrected, for printing out. This next process is perhaps the core of the new technology. The story to be printed is transmitted to the electronic typesetter. This takes from the computer the keyed in stories, which are at this stage nothing more than an electronic representative of mathematical codes. From these codes the typesetting device builds up lines of type on a cathode ray tube. This works in much the same way as a television set, electrons bombarding a screen in a linear pattern to build up letters and words. Each letter is built up each time from a pattern of tiny lines, in a way not unlike the way a calculator or a digital watch creates numerals. The phototypesetter has its own minicomputer, the third in the system, with its own disc storage. From the code it builds up the letters in the required font (type style), size, and column width, and projects them on the cathode ray tube. A band of photographic paper moves over this at great speed, being exposed to the lines of light. This paper is developed automatically, producing the “type” that appears in the paper.

Apart from the computer’s justification of lines, it is at this stage that the process is perhaps farthest removed from Gutenberg. At the beginning, printers hand-assembled type at the rate of letters per minute. The mechanical typesetting of the 1890 s lifted the rate to lines per minute. The machines were encumbered only by their own construction rathei* than by human operating speeds with the development after World War II of punchtape justification. But the electronic typesetting now measures output in thousands of lines per minute. The words you are reading were printed at 3000 lines per minute. The cathode tube creates the images so fast that the lens has to be specially curved. The paper must move across the screen so quickly that if it were not for the curve the ends of the lines of print would be skewed. Each night, after the newspaper has been produced, the stories are transferred from the discs to magnetic tape for storage, and the discs are dumped (cleared). The men who run the computer are, with one exception, former printers who spent a year training for their task. Seven of them are system controllers, who work in shifts of two. Another three men, formerly linotype mechanists have been trained as electronics specialists, and maintain some of the computers’ peripheral devices, such as display screens. The journeymen typographers have new jobs, at keyboards, as system controllers, or as compositors with the print-out sheets rather than with columns of type. Their working environment has changed from one of ink, machine clatter, and the fumes of molten lead, to a near-silent room with carpet on the floor, and much less ink smearing than you find in a typical office. The non-printer in the team is a mathematics graduate and computer programmer. He worked for a number of companies, made training visits to the United States and Australia, before joining “The Press.” The computers sit in a locked, air-conditioned chamber on a raised floor (so that cables can be run easily under it). The equipment is up to the minute — but not for long. Because of the great rate of progress in computer technology, it will be out of date within five years or so.