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As in family.
My grandfather died on Saturday. He was 80 years old, a WWII veteran, a printer, and a cancer patient. I used to spend my summers with him until I was a teenager. Those summers were spent doing all sorts of things. Lots of camping on the weekends, spending lazy summer days with my grandmother while he was at work, and helping set type for the letter press in the print shop sometimes. He had a Heidelberg. Of all the presses he ever owned, the Heidelberg was his favorite.
The last few years all he's done is offset printing, he didn't even own a letter press when he died, just the three offset presses in the shop, but he still missed his Heidelberg. Offset printing uses an thin aluminum sheet with a chemical film on it attached to a rotating drum as a 'plate'. You burn a negative image into the film, which the ink will now stick to, and pass that over your stock. If you want more than one color, you do it again for each color. It's slightly more complex than that, but this is good enough.
Printing on a letter press is more involved. You have to set your type by hand. He used to have giant cabinets, with each drawer holding a certain typeface. The typefaces were what are refered to as fonts in offset printing (and of course, in the 2d world of your monitor), but they were each a piece of cast lead. Each drawer held one typeface, in one point size, of upper case, lower case, and special characters. There was a casement that fit into the letter press, and this was your frame.
When we talk about font sizes, weights, and fixed or variable width fonts, we are still using terminology that is hundreds of years old that all comes from the simple act of setting cast pieces of lead into a frame, which then has an ink roller passed over it and is pressed onto a sheet of stock.
Variable width type faces were only as wide as needed to hold the letter or character, where fixed type used the same width for everything. It always amuses me when I see people arguing over which is better. Niether is better, you used whichever was appropriate for the job on a printing press. In the digital world, using variable versus fixed fonts can totally fuck up your formatting from host to host, but in printing, once it's on the paper, it will always look the same.
Weight is just that. It's a measure of how much pressure is used to press the block of type onto the stock. The more weight, the longer the type is in contact with the stock, the deeper the type face is pressed into the stock, and the more the ink penetrates the stock. This is why paper is weighted. It tells the printer how much weight the paper can take from the press. In really early presses, this was literal of course, since you didn't have an arm applying force, but an actual weight sitting on top of the casement which applied the pressure when you lowered it onto the paper. Using less weight than the paper is weighted for gives you a very delicate transfer which with certain typefaces is gorgeous. Using more gives you some level of embossing, and there are times when you don't apply any ink to the rollers, and just emboss the paper with your block. Using ink and really heavy weight gives a bolder transfer that is deep and dark, not quite bold, which is its own typeface, but something more than normal.
And of course, point sizes are well, just that. A point in printing is an actual unit of measure, and your type was measured in points. When you talk about a 10 point typeface, it doesn't matter which typeface you're using, it's always exactly the same size, which makes it easy and convenient to mix different typefaces on a single line. Point size means nothing in the digital world, as the font size is rendered dependent on size and resolution of the monitor, and changes accordingly. When you're setting type though, and you need this word in the middle italicized, you have to use an italic type face, and if it's not the same size and it doesn't fit properly, you have a problem. A ten point type face in any style uses the exact same vertical point size as any other ten point type face (since width is variable, point size is measured along the vertical). And like above, once the ink transfer has happened, it's forever. Anyone can read that sheet of paper, and it will always be the same size. Any printer anywhere in the world can set that same line of type using the same typeface(s) and point size, and duplicate it exactly.
Adobe has done a similar thing with PS and PDF, but even PS/PDF renders on the screen dependent on resolution and monitor size, and PS isn't available on every printer in the world, and even the PS capable printers don't all have the same font set on board. Just as a note, point size still means the exact same thing when talking about fonts for offset printing as it does with a letter press. A ten point font on an offset press is the exact same size as a ten point type face on a letter press.
The man loved printing. You'd be amazed how many printers are still out there. It costs fractions of a penny per page to print on a mechanical press, versus a couple cents per page on a toner, ink, or wax based digital printing engine (copy machine, computer printer, facs machine, etc.). He was still printing until the Friday before he died. There were still half completed jobs on the presses in the print shop.
Of all the cool things I learned from him, how to set type is still at the top of the list.
My grandfather died on Saturday. He was 80 years old, a WWII veteran, a printer, and a cancer patient. I used to spend my summers with him until I was a teenager. Those summers were spent doing all sorts of things. Lots of camping on the weekends, spending lazy summer days with my grandmother while he was at work, and helping set type for the letter press in the print shop sometimes. He had a Heidelberg. Of all the presses he ever owned, the Heidelberg was his favorite.
The last few years all he's done is offset printing, he didn't even own a letter press when he died, just the three offset presses in the shop, but he still missed his Heidelberg. Offset printing uses an thin aluminum sheet with a chemical film on it attached to a rotating drum as a 'plate'. You burn a negative image into the film, which the ink will now stick to, and pass that over your stock. If you want more than one color, you do it again for each color. It's slightly more complex than that, but this is good enough.
Printing on a letter press is more involved. You have to set your type by hand. He used to have giant cabinets, with each drawer holding a certain typeface. The typefaces were what are refered to as fonts in offset printing (and of course, in the 2d world of your monitor), but they were each a piece of cast lead. Each drawer held one typeface, in one point size, of upper case, lower case, and special characters. There was a casement that fit into the letter press, and this was your frame.
When we talk about font sizes, weights, and fixed or variable width fonts, we are still using terminology that is hundreds of years old that all comes from the simple act of setting cast pieces of lead into a frame, which then has an ink roller passed over it and is pressed onto a sheet of stock.
Variable width type faces were only as wide as needed to hold the letter or character, where fixed type used the same width for everything. It always amuses me when I see people arguing over which is better. Niether is better, you used whichever was appropriate for the job on a printing press. In the digital world, using variable versus fixed fonts can totally fuck up your formatting from host to host, but in printing, once it's on the paper, it will always look the same.
Weight is just that. It's a measure of how much pressure is used to press the block of type onto the stock. The more weight, the longer the type is in contact with the stock, the deeper the type face is pressed into the stock, and the more the ink penetrates the stock. This is why paper is weighted. It tells the printer how much weight the paper can take from the press. In really early presses, this was literal of course, since you didn't have an arm applying force, but an actual weight sitting on top of the casement which applied the pressure when you lowered it onto the paper. Using less weight than the paper is weighted for gives you a very delicate transfer which with certain typefaces is gorgeous. Using more gives you some level of embossing, and there are times when you don't apply any ink to the rollers, and just emboss the paper with your block. Using ink and really heavy weight gives a bolder transfer that is deep and dark, not quite bold, which is its own typeface, but something more than normal.
And of course, point sizes are well, just that. A point in printing is an actual unit of measure, and your type was measured in points. When you talk about a 10 point typeface, it doesn't matter which typeface you're using, it's always exactly the same size, which makes it easy and convenient to mix different typefaces on a single line. Point size means nothing in the digital world, as the font size is rendered dependent on size and resolution of the monitor, and changes accordingly. When you're setting type though, and you need this word in the middle italicized, you have to use an italic type face, and if it's not the same size and it doesn't fit properly, you have a problem. A ten point type face in any style uses the exact same vertical point size as any other ten point type face (since width is variable, point size is measured along the vertical). And like above, once the ink transfer has happened, it's forever. Anyone can read that sheet of paper, and it will always be the same size. Any printer anywhere in the world can set that same line of type using the same typeface(s) and point size, and duplicate it exactly.
Adobe has done a similar thing with PS and PDF, but even PS/PDF renders on the screen dependent on resolution and monitor size, and PS isn't available on every printer in the world, and even the PS capable printers don't all have the same font set on board. Just as a note, point size still means the exact same thing when talking about fonts for offset printing as it does with a letter press. A ten point font on an offset press is the exact same size as a ten point type face on a letter press.
The man loved printing. You'd be amazed how many printers are still out there. It costs fractions of a penny per page to print on a mechanical press, versus a couple cents per page on a toner, ink, or wax based digital printing engine (copy machine, computer printer, facs machine, etc.). He was still printing until the Friday before he died. There were still half completed jobs on the presses in the print shop.
Of all the cool things I learned from him, how to set type is still at the top of the list.
