Introduction to Typesetting (Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition)

45.10. Introduction to Typesetting

Once upon a time, printers were simple. You hooked them up to your machine and dumped text out to them, and they printed the text. Nothing fancy, and not very pretty either. As printers got smarter, they became capable of more things, printing in a different font, perhaps. Printing got a bit more complex. If you wanted to use fancy features, you had to embed special characters in your text, specific to the printer.

Printers got even smarter, and could draw pictures, print images, and use all sorts of fonts. They started using complex languages (Section 45.14) to print, which made dealing with them more complex but at least somewhat more consistent. People wrote tools to convert text (Section 45.7) so it could be printed.

Webster defines typesetting as "the process of setting material in type or into a form to be used in printing," literally, the setting of type into a printing press. As computers have gotten more sophisticated, it has come to include the formatting of text and images to send to typesetting machines and then, later, smart printers. These days, your average printer is pretty smart and can handle everything the typesetters of old could do and more. Windows systems provide What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG, pronounced whiz-ee-wig) editors as a matter of course, most of which do all of their typesetting without any user intervention (and often badly, to boot).

On Unix, typesetting generally involves describing the formatting you want using a formatting language and then processing the source file to generate something that a printer can understand. There are a variety of tools and languages that do this, with various purposes, strengths, and weaknesses. Many formatting languages are markup languages, that is, they introduce formatting information by "marking up" the text you want formatted.

There is an entire science (and art) of typography that we won't try to get into here. My personal favorite books on the subject are Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style for general typography and Donald Knuth's Digital Typography for issues of typesetting with computers.

What we will try to cover are formatting languages (Section 45.12 and Section 45.13), printer languages (Section 45.14), and ways to use Unix to get those formatting languages out to your printer usefully (Section 45.15 through Section 45.17).

Relatively recently, open source WYSIWYG tools have become available for Unix. OpenOffice, available at http://www.openoffice.org, is a good example. OpenOffice does its own typesetting behind the scenes and dumps out PostScript. If you don't have a PostScript printer and you're interested in using something like OpenOffice, Section 45.18 might help.

-- DJPH