History of the Linotype Company

Glossary

xiii GLOSSARY ANPA: American Newspaper Publishers Association ATF: American Type Fellowship. An informal organization of hot-metal aficionados. ATF: American Type Foundry. The conglomerate formed by the 23 remaining type foundries after the Linotype put many of them out of business. belting: The belts that connected the motors that ran the Linotype to moving parts of the machine, such as keyboard and cam actions book face (vs. newspaper face): Newspaper typefaces were printed on newsprint using stereotype plates. Book typefaces could have more thins and refinements. cannon or canon: At one time typefaces did not have numbers for point sizes. Canon represented 48 point, also called four-line. Both spellings were used. cannon: On the Linotype machine, the cannon was similar to a fireplace flue that vented heat from the pot. channel: The slot in the Linotype magazine in which the matrix ran. Most magazines had 90 channels. cicero: The European equivalent of a pica, although slightly larger in size. cold type: The general term for any typesetting method that was not hot metal display type or display composition: Usually any point size 14 point or larger Drupa: The international trade exhibition held every four years in Germany since 1952. duplexing: Placing two typefaces on one matrix, regular and bold or regular and italic, for instance em: A fundamental unit of typesetting measurement —the width of the point size. Thus in a 10point typeface, the em was 10 points wide. It was not the width of the letter M. Honest. en: Half of an em. In hot metal, numerals were usually on the en width. It had nothing to do with the letter N. ETAOIN: The first row of keys on the Linotype keyboard . Ottmar Mergenthaler based his keyboard on letter frequency use in the English language. face: A set of glyphs in a certain design, serif or sans serif, for instance. See also typeface. flag: The logo for a newspaper’s name. Often mistakenly called the masthead; it is not. See also masthead. flong: A stereotype mold. It was made of papier-mâch é and pressed against the raised metal type under pressure to create a mold. Molten metal was then poured into it to make a plate for printing. font: A collection of all the glyphs in a particular typeface and, in hot metal, a particular point size. See also glyph and type. forme: A locked up page (or pages) in hot metal. The lines of type were locked up in a metal frame called a chase. founders’ type: Individual glyphs cast as independent units; handset type foundry type: See founders’ type glyph: Any letter, numeral, punctuation, or symbol that imparts humanly intelligible information. See also font and type. xiv head-letter: Display type—any point size 14 point or larger Hectograph, or gelatin duplicator, or jellygraph: A printing process that transferred an original work, prepared with special inks, to a pan of gelatin or a gelatin pad pulled tight on a metal frame. Used to duplicate type drawings in the 1930s and 1940s. hot type: Any device that cast type, as individual characters or as lines, using molten metal Invar™ tube: A nickel-iron alloy with a uniquely low coefficient of thermal expansion. Used in some Linotype thermometer systems. italic (vs. oblique): Typefaces that tilted to the right. Used for emphasis, the names of publications, and other applications. Italics are designed, whereas obliques are geometrically slanted. See also oblique. ITU: International Typographical Union. Founded in the 1850s by Horace Greeley, it was the first industrial union in the U.S. justification: Setting all lines in a column to the same width so the left and right margins line up justifier: See spaceband keyrod: A rod that connected the Linotype keys to the release mechanism of the magazine L&M: Linotype and Machinery Co. Ltd., England Legibility Group: A select group of typefaces designed for the newspaper industry in order to provide better readability on newsprint paper printed by a number of letterpress techniques. They included: Ionic No. 5, Excelsior, Opticon, Paragon, and Corona. ligature: Two letters expressed as one unit. fi and fl are examples. liner: The piece of metal used in the Linotype mold to set the line width. F516 was the part number; F872 for a recessed mold. linecaster: A typesetting machine that cast lines of type line-shafting: The use of a central motor to drive a shaft from which belts transfer the energy to individual machines. Linotype metal: A mixture of lead, tin, and antimony...