On this page I will attempt, if I may, to give a synopsis of how typography has developed over the centuries, and the part it plays in our daily lives. Every piece of printed matter, whatever form it may be in; every website published; they all come down to one basic principle: Typography. Without it there wouldn't be any printed matter or websites, and scribes would still be using a quill pen and dye and writing on parchment.

A Brief History of Typography
The rapid rise of the world wide web and the advancement in word processors sounded the death knell for the traditional methods of typesetting, although there are still some small print shops that keep the craft alive.

Even with the introduction of mechanical typesetting, there was still a great deal that had to be typeset by hand, and although a highly skilled craft, it was a slow, laborious task where the compositor (typesetter) had to compose the words using individual metal letters, an example of which is below:

Just as the invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 revolutionized putting ink on paper, so new technology revolutionized the modern printing industry as we knew it, particularly in the field of typesetting.

Although typesetting had become more sophisticated since the breakthrough by Gutenberg, the basic principles were still the same. Now moves were afoot to find a cleaner, quicker, and cheaper way to produce the printed page.

From the 1950's onward, various methods had been experimented with to try to find a way to reduced the cost and labor-intensive page production using traditional methods of typesetting. Many of these were unsatisfactory, producing poor images unsuitable for printing.

Until 1985, when the big breakthrough came: Desktop Publishing! This was the big breakthrough the big players in the printing industry: Newspaper, Magazine and Periodical publishers, had been waiting for.

As DTP became more advanced, new sophisticated software was developed, which allowed graphic designers, typographers and typesetters to quickly and cost-effectively compose and edit pages on a computer screen rather than the long, drawn-out traditional way. Typography hadn't become extinct, it had just reached new levels!

So, you may ask: "Where did all this lead to?" It lead to the biggest breakthrough of all, without which you wouldn't be reading this tutorial.

On 6 August, 1991, at the CERN Nuclear Research Laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland, the first ever website was published by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, the address of which was: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.

I wonder how Gutenberg would feel if he could now see the development in technology which had arisen from his invention over five hundred years ago? Perhaps Mark Twain (1835-1910) summed it up perfectly with his eulogy:

"What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source, but we are bound to bring him homage, … for the bad that his colossal invention has brought about is overshadowed a thousand times by the good with which mankind has been favored."