In the middle of writing a book in 2024, I managed to write well over 1,000 words that I realized should be cut, as much as I enjoyed writing and researching them. You get the benefit. Here’s a section that won’t appear in How Comics Were Made’s section on the transition from relief metal printing to offset lithographic printing.

By the 1980s, phototypesetting and cathode-ray tube (CRT) composition, already in some use in the 1970s, fully replaced hot-metal Linotype typesetting. Both new kinds of typesetting were called cold type in contrast to the previous hot type, and both were purely optical and flat: they relied on light exposure onto emulsion-coated paper. Both presaged the coming of digital imaging and scanning in the next era.

(For youngsters, CRTs were what everyone used as a computer display until the advent of LCD displays. Essentially, a television that took and converted digital input, CRTs could weigh 10 or 20 times as much as an LCD of the same dimensions.)

Phototype came first, and used what looked like negative film with characters of type cut out—they were transparent. Early phototype devices required a lot of manual effort, such as rotating a dial containing the type and then pushing a button to expose and advance paper. This was useful largely for headlines and some advertising copy.