What did they print?

Block printing first came to Europe as a method for printing on cloth, where it was common by 1300. Before that people used woodblock print to print religious illustrations. This new possibility enabled a fast and easy reproduction of books and paperwork, that were usually required in large editions (e.g. the Bible or ownership documents).
This new printing method also provided books for schools and quickly became a very important part of their libraries.

How does it work?

The first part of the letterprint idea was using a single, hand-carved character to create identical copies of itself. Letterpress printing typical works with ink on paper using a printing press and was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century.
Druing the first step of the traditional printing process one bookpage is build by putting together all the single lead letters. Depending on the font-size the time to build one page with 1500 letters required one hour.

The Gutenberg Bible

The most well-known work of this period is the Johannes Gutenberg Bible. Printed between 1452 and 1454 in Mainz, Germany. It consists of 1282 pages and was then printed in 180 copies. Beside the 150 Bibles printed on paper, there were about 30 editions made out of parchment.
Gutenberg developed around 290 letters to produce the first edition. The color illustrations have been added after the printing process. 48 copies have been preserved until today. The Gutenberg Bible had an incalculable effect on the history of the printed book.

Phototypesetting

Phototypesetting systems first appeared in the early 1960s. These devices consisted of glass disks that spun in front of a light source to selectively expose characters onto light-sensitive paper. The typesetter then typed a line of text on a Fairchild keyboard. To verify correct content of the line it was typed a second time. If the two lines were identical a bell rang and the machine produced a punched paper tape corresponding to the text. This was used to create a mechanical drawing or paste up of a whole page. A large film negative of the page is shot and used to make plates for offset printing.

All this changed after the first pre-engineered system appeared. This symstem combined every step in one box, including all editing processes up to the exposure to light. This software also contained a hyphenation-programm. A keyboard was used to type the text into the system and a small display showed the written text and its formatting.
After a few years and better-developed computers, it was finally possible to view the entire print image on a screen.

System Fonts

Until recently, Webdesigner were only able to use a few system fonts such as Arial, Verdana, Geneva, Courier or Garamond. Bigger headlines used either graphically images or a javascript based solution. This limited the options of the design varieties.

Arial
Verdana
Geneva
Courier
Garamond