Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 42 No. 2. March 5 1979
3 — Typesetting
3
Typesetting
The typesetter that Salient has is really a form of glorified electric typewriter. It prints onto paper, using a fancy carbon ribbon to give a clearer impression than the fabric ribbons that most typewriters are fitted with. But visually it looks almost identical to an ordinary electric typewriter.
In common with IBM typewriters (as our machine is an IBM typesetter), the machine does not have individual metal striking pieces for each symbol on the keyboard of the machine (as manual typewriters have). Rather impressions of all the symbols are carried on a metal ball (a golf-ball or font). When a key is pressed the golf-ball first turns so as to turn the appropriate letter to the front of the golf-ball and it then strikes the ribbon. The advantage of using this method is that by changing golf-balls it is possible to get a wide range of type styles and sizes. On our machine we can get six different sizes of type in about fifty different styles (if that is we could afford to buy all the golf-balls available).
The major difference between a type-setter and a typewriter is that, on a typewriter each letter is the same width (ie an "i" takes up as much space width-ways as as "m") but on a typesetter each letter has its own width (eg an "m" is three times as wide as an "i").
Rather than typesetting right across the page, we type in columns of generally a width of 6cm. This gives four columns of the same width across the page, which we have found the most satisfactory arrangement.