International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Typography is a process for reproducing text, figures, punctuation, characters, ornaments, and borders via a printing press or electronic communication. Typography is distinguished from calligraphy, by which single, handwritten copies are made. Manuscripts set into type may be printed or stored electronically, allowing an infinite number of exact replicas to be distributed widely. Early typeface designs were modeled after calligraphic letter-forms but book typefaces quickly moved away from writing as a model. In a development spurred by the Industrial Revolution, commercialization, and later the growth of digital typography, which made type design easier, hundreds of thousands of formal, informal, and decorative typestyles are in use today. Typography is technically prefigured in the stamping of seals and signets, a process found in many early civilizations. Starting in the third century ce , the Chinese carved letters into wood blocks for printing. Eventually whole books were carved in relief on wood slabs. The oldest surviving xylographic or woodblock →  book is the Buddhist Diamond sutra printed in China in 868 ce . In 1045, Pi Sheng of China may have developed the first form of handset or movable type, the name given to processes where multiple copies of individual letters (called characters, sorts, or glyphs) are cast so they can be combined and printed with other characters, ... log in or subscribe to read full text