A Companion to the History of the Book (71 page)

The description of PageMaker as a page-layout application indicates its significance: the composition process changed from one that was concerned with the creation of individual columns of type, which were combined with images in a separate operation, into one that was concerned with the dynamic creation of whole pages. This change of function meant that typographic output devices previously known as phototypesetters became image-setters: no longer did type have a means of output all to itself. Monotype and Linotype allowed their image-setters to be driven by the device-independent Adobe PostScript RIPs as well as their proprietary ones, beginning the convergence of the “high-end” of professional typesetting with the “low-resolution” end of desktop publishing.

This convergence was seen immediately in the availability of common typefaces for desktop use and for professional publishing applications. No longer were typefaces proprietary to composition systems: any PostScript (or later TrueType) fount would work on any PostScript device. Office documents changed from mono-spaced typewriter styles that had been used even on electric typewriters, to “professional” proportional designs. Linotype and Monotype rapidly digitized large parts of their type libraries, originally created as part of the marketing of their composition equipment, but now viewed as separate assets. However, the real innovations came from the much smaller digital foundries that immediately developed – and from Adobe itself. In particular, the concentration of type design in Britain, Germany, and the United States was challenged by type designers redressing the imbalance between Latin and non-Latin types, helped by the establishment of Unicode, a standardized approach to defining character positions within founts (Hudson 2002). By the end of the period, the names Linotype and Monotype were associated only with the marketing of digital type, not with typesetting equipment.

The combination of the introduction of the Apple Macintosh and the IBM PC as standard hardware, and of Adobe’s PostScript page-description language, had changed the paradigm for composition. From a PostScript file created in Adobe’s PageMaker software, the Apple LaserWriter could print a page at good-enough resolution for a desktop; the Linotronic 300 could output the same page, with the same Adobe founts, at professional print quality. As well as integration, the Mac and PC offered ease of use. The front ends that were so competent at handling text composition lacked the interactivity that was necessary for highly illustrated books. Previously, the composition of pages for illustrated books could be handled in one of two ways. Designers could prepare layouts for a typesetter to implement by piecing together film of text and images, or themselves prepare artwork boards by pasting up text elements and indicating positions for illustrations (which had to be separately inserted at the final film stage). An example of this is the
Reader’s Digest Repair Manual
(1972). Both approaches required the initial setting of all text type and headlines as galleys, which would be divided into the necessary chunks to fit the page layout: in this respect photo-composition differed little from metal composition. Now that images could be scanned and digitized, PageMaker took the artwork board as a metaphor and allowed designers to cut, paste, and arrange text and images electronically – with every element visible on screen exactly as it would print.

The transfer of author-keyed text to the typesetting process was simplified. Files from word-processing applications could now be imported into page-layout applications by designers or typesetters. The need for authors to add generic codes to identify text elements disappeared – PageMaker could understand Word’s internal codes for italic, bold, and so on. The
Oxford Children’s Encyclopedia
(1991) and the
Oxford Illustrated Encyclopedia
(1993) demonstrate the adoption of desktop techniques into professional book production. The
OCE
was produced by importing Word files into PageMaker. Writing to fit a layout was a major beneficiary of this change. Whereas copy-fitting had previously required either meticulous cast-off or a willingness to re-set type at galley stage to suit a page layout, the interactivity of desktop publishing allowed editors and designers to work collaboratively to resolve questions of copy-fitting and make-up. While most of the
OCE’s
illustrations were conventionally drawn and scanned, the
OIE
rapidly moved to preparing all its artwork on a Macintosh, using PostScript drawing applications such as Freehand. Drawings produced using PostScript, like PostScript founts, could be sized independently of output resolution. This allowed easy integration with pages constructed in Quark XPress, the desktop composition software introduced in 1987 that became more widely used than PageMaker. It was also possible to systematize keyboarding of copy in the word-processing application, by using either Quark XPress’s proprietary tags or matching style-sheet definitions, thus automating the formatting of text as it was imported into the page-make-up application.

Although Quark XPress came to dominate small-scale typesetting, developments of front-end systems maintained a role for more complex titles. Interset’s Quoin (1990) and Advent’s 3B2 (which included a TeX module for mathematical composition) provided publishing-system functionality on desktop hardware; they were particularly good at setting dictionaries and reference works, where publishers required that the data they had supplied be returned in SGML or extensible mark-up language (XML) format. (XML offered more flexibility in reflecting document structure than SGML, and could be used to generate Internet pages as well as printed pages.) Adobe’s Frame-maker text-processing application (from 1986), which could accept SGML (and later XML) files as input, also retained a niche in the market, but generally for technical documentation rather than one-off book typesetting, where XPress, though less capable of automation, was more flexible. XPress, and its Adobe rival InDesign (1999), also allowed designers directly to create templates and styles for typesetters to use, while Quoin and other front ends still required a specification that was implemented by the typesetter.

The production of
Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England
(2000) allows us to consider some broader aspects of publishing policy, as well as the methods of composition used (Morgan 2003). The design process followed the desktop publishing model. The Church of England (who acted as their own publishers) commissioned a design company (rather than a typesetting or publishing house) to design and typeset the book. The simultaneous print and electronic publication shows that, even for such a formal text, the typeset, printed, bound version no longer has automatic primacy.
Common Worship
provided an authorized alternative to the 1662
Book of Common Prayer
and a replacement for the 1980
Alternative Service Book.
The
Book of Common Prayer
had been reprinted in the period, but from existing metal settings. The
Alternative Service Book
was “conventionally” typeset on a Linotron 202 in Palatino, very much a typeface of this period, and a departure from the workaday typefaces previously used for the majority of prayer books. It was the last service book to be published for the Church of England by the Oxford and Cambridge university presses and the Queen’s Printer.

Common Worship
was a response to its publisher’s requirement that it should be designed for use, and that consideration should be given to users with visual impairment or lack of manual dexterity. It was decided that page breaks should fall so that no prayers were broken across pages: the longest single prayer was identified, and decisions on type size and page size based on that. Like its previous publishers, the Church of England developed a detailed liturgical house style guide, transferring responsibility for detailed textual consistency to the designers of the book. This hands-on approach, using Quark XPress, ensured the necessary control over the page make-up, and also allowed design refinements to be introduced during the production of the book as different sections were proofed (the whole production being to a tight schedule). A disadvantage of a desktop system that focused mainly on page layout was the lack of any structural tagging of the text, which had implications for its continuing life as an electronic document.

Common Worship
was also made available for download from the Church of England’s website in Adobe’s portable document format (PDF) and in Microsoft Word-compatible rich-text format (RTF). The PDF preserves exactly the typographic formatting and page layout of the printed edition. It can be printed out, but it cannot easily be manipulated, for example to create a service sheet with a particular combination of liturgical options. To do this, the RTF is required, as selected text can be copied from it and pasted into another document. The RTF preserves the text, but does not use style sheets to control the typographic styling of particular elements; paragraphs carry typographic formatting but are not identified structurally, so the formatting can easily be lost or become inconsistent. Moreover, the typographic styling of the RTF is only an approximation of that used in the printed text: the typeface Arial, a default on all computers, is used instead of the less widely available Gill Sans used in the printed book; subtle differences of type weight and spacing are lost, as is the identification of congregational responses by the speech-prefix “All.” It is an irony that, given the great care with which editors and designers considered the fall of text on the printed page, such user-focused considerations are lost when the text is used to produce a derivative document. A solution for documents of this kind is the use of XML tagging, which allows reference to external schema (similar to the document type definition required by SGML) which can allow output formats to be designed for different production circumstances. At the time of writing, this functionality does not exist within Microsoft Word.

This period saw typesetting change from systems that capture data for a specific typographic output system to part of an integrated chain of document production, which may have printed output as only one of its aims. Authors and copy-editors began to work interactively with their texts. Designers, using page-layout applications, took a hands-on role in composition (Hendel 1998: 189–90). Typesetting moved to a generally more stable technological environment after 1985, after a period of competing and incompatible photo-composition and typewriter-based systems. Standardization on PostScript as a page-description language enabled a rebirth of creative type design. This addressed issues of optical scaling and correct weighting for output systems – essentially making type look right at any size rather than using uncorrected linear scaling – that had been integral to metal type production, but which were usually inadequately implemented in phototypesetting (Tracy 1986: 54). Large character sets were made practical by the increase in computer storage capacity and the development of the Unicode standard. Although workflows became more integrated, word-processing, design and layout, automated composition, and web distribution were still handled through separate applications. While the aim of the designer and typesetter was still to give each text an ideal typographic form, it was now understood that the dominant requirement for any text processing was the need for flexible reuse and universal distribution: any print publication should be considered as just one instance of that text, and not necessarily the form that would be most widely available.

References and Further Reading

Alschuler, Liora (1995)
A
BC
D … SGML: A User’s Guide to Structured Information.
London: International Thomson Computer.

Bringhurst, Robert (1992)
The Elements of Typographic Style.
Vancouver: Hartley & Marks.

Chicago Guide to Preparing Electronic Manuscripts.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press Oxford,
39th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Heath, L. G. and Faux, Ian (1978)
A Manual of Phototypesetting.
Manchester: Lithographic Training Services.

Hendel, Richard (1998)
On Book Design.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hudson, John (2002) “Unicode: From Text to Type.” In John D. Berry (ed.),
Language, Culture, Type,
pp. 24–44. New York: Association Typographique International.

Knuth, Donald E. (1999)
Digital Typography.
Stanford: CSLI.

Luna, Paul (1990) “The Oxford English Dictionary.”
Baseline,
13: 34–7.

— (2000) “Clearly Defined: Continuity and Innovation in the Typography of English Dictionaries.”
Typography Papers,
4: 5–56.

Mitchell, Michael and Wightman, Susan (2005)
Book Typography: A Designer’s Manual.
Marlborough: Libanus.

Morgan, John (2003) “An Account of the Making of
Common Worship.” Typography Papers,
3: 33–64.

Oxford Rules for the Preparation of Text on Microcomputers.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Ragg, Edward and Luna, Paul (2003) “Designing the Oxford Shakespeare.”
Typography Papers,
5: 5–22.

Seybold, John W. (1977)
Fundamentals of Modern Composition.
Media, PA: Seybold.

— (1984)
The World of Digital Typesetting.
Media, PA: Seybold.

Southall, Richard (2005)
Printing Type in the Twentieth Century: Manufacturing and Design Methods.
London: British Library

Steinberg, S. H. (1996)
Five Hundred Years of Printing,
ed. and rev. John Trevitt. London: British Library

Sutherland, John (1999)
Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tracy, Walter (1986)
Letters of Credit.
London: Gordon Fraser.

Urdang, Laurence (1984) “A Lexicographer’s Adventures in Computing.”
Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America,
6: 150–65.