[HN Gopher] Pre-Digital Font Tech: Formatt
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       Pre-Digital Font Tech: Formatt
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2023-06-27 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.marksimonson.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.marksimonson.com)
        
       | BashiBazouk wrote:
       | I worked with type like this back in the day. The burnish type
       | reproduced much cleaner than this stuff. The big problem with the
       | acetate was the edges. Some would reflect light and require quite
       | a bit of touch up once the negatives were made. The other problem
       | was the background was not a pure white so a longer exposure was
       | required which would sometimes mess up the carefully created
       | halftones. When the first laser printers came out they were 300
       | dpi and not really good enough for serious use in printing but
       | the type in this article were a time consuming pain for anything
       | beyond a headline and phototype setting was very expensive. We
       | used to have the graphic artist print out at double the size they
       | wanted to use it (or as big as possible) then reduce it down on a
       | process camera as a hack to make the laser printers a viable
       | replacement until the resolution caught up a few years later.
       | 
       | My step grandfather was a letter pressman who had a studio in his
       | home after he retired from the Grabhorn press in San Francisco.
       | His idea of a font was a large box of drawers on wheels packed
       | full of metal type.
        
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       (page generated 2023-06-27 23:01 UTC)