The Linotronic imagesetters are a type of high-quality

printer Printer may refer to: Technology * Printer (publishing), a person * Printer (computing), a hardware device * Optical printer for motion picture films People * Nariman Printer (fl. c. 1940), Indian journalist and activist * James Printer (1640 ...

, 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 practitioner who follows the discipline of graphic design, either within companies or organizations or independently. They are professionals in design and visual communication, with their primary focus on transforming l ...

s to cheaply set type that exceeded the quality of many

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

systems in use at the time. It allowed output by taking a

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

file on a removable disk to a

service bureau A service bureau is a company that provides business services for a fee. The term has been extensively used to describe technology-based services to financial services companies, particularly banks. Service bureaus are a significant sector within ...

for output on the bureau's Linotronic. Manufactured by

Mergenthaler Linotype Company The Mergenthaler Linotype Company was a company 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 manufacturer ...

and popularized by the Adobe

raster image processor A raster image processor (RIP) is a component used in a printing system which produces a raster image also known as a bitmap. Such a bitmap is used by a later stage of the printing system to produce the printed output. The input may be a page ...

(RIP), enabling PostScript 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 th ...

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

integrated circuits An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...

(ICs), including

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a color encoding system for analog 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 such as QMS and

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...

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 multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It is one of the top 10 semiconductor companies worldwide based on sales volume. The company's focus is on developing analog ...

' 7400 series) ICs.

References

History of Linotype: 1963–1972

Printing {{tech-stub