The Linotronic imagesetters are a now common type of high-quality printer, capable of printing at resolutions of up to 2540

dots per inch Dots per inch (DPI, or dpiThe acronym appears in sources as either "DPI" or lowercase "dpi". See "Print Resolution Understanding 4-bit depth – Xerox" (PDF). Xerox.com. September 2012.) is a measure of spatial printing, video or image scanner ...

. The Linotronic allowed

graphic artist A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography, or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published me ...

s to cheaply set type that exceeded the quality of many

phototypesetting Phototypesetting is a method of setting type. It uses photography to make columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper. It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing ( digital typesetting). T ...

systems in use at the time. Although too expensive for homes or most offices, but cheaper than many other alternatives of printing, it was the graphic designer's dream: output by taking a

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, ...

file on a removable disk to a service bureau for output on the bureau's Linotronic. Manufactured by

Mergenthaler Linotype Company The Mergenthaler Linotype Company is a corporation founded in the United States in 1886 to market the Linotype machine (), a system to cast metal type in lines (linecaster) invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. It became the world's leading manufactu ...

and popularized by the

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for '' mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of ...

RIP Rest in peace (RIP), a phrase from the Latin (), is sometimes used in traditional Christian services and prayers, such as in the Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Methodist denominations, to wish the soul of a decedent eternal rest and peac ...

, enabling

language files to be imaged by the Linotronic imagesetter. Although it was the first ''commercial'' usage of PostScript, which began the emergence of graphics applications dominance by Adobe, the first ''popular'' use of PostScript was the

Apple Laserwriter The LaserWriter is a laser printer with built-in PostScript interpreter sold by Apple, Inc. from 1985 to 1988. It was one of the first laser printers available to the mass market. In combination with WYSIWYG publishing software like PageMaker, ...

(succeeded a few months later by the LaserWriter Plus). Adobe's RIPs have, generally, been named for United States rockets (Atlas, Redstone, etcetera), but Apple's RIP was of its own design, and was implemented using remarkably few

integrated circuits An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Transistor count, Large ...

(ICs), including

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analogue television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

s for most combinatorial logic, with the subsystem timing, DRAM refreshing, and rasterization functions being implemented in very few medium-integration PALs. Apple's competitors (i.e., QMS, NEC, and others) have generally used a variation of one of Adobe's RIPs with their large quantity of low-integration (i.e.,

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globa ...

' 7400 series) ICs. The latest RIPs are stand-alone fast PCs executing an x86 implementation of PostScript, with a special video output interface to the imagesetter.

References

History of Linotype: 1963–1972

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