The Press: Printing a Dream

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Economy-minded newspaper publishers have long nourished a dollar-saving daydream. In their profit-filled reverie, automatic machines turn reporters' edited copy directly into metal type; no high-salaried typesetters intervene. Like most daydreams, this one has always seemed too good to be true. But at least two newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and the Palm Beach Post-Times, are already deep in promising experiments that use computers for typesetterless typesetting.

The greatest obstacle to full automation in the composing room is "justification"—ending lines evenly at the right-hand margin. When the operator of a typesetting machine nears the end of a line, he estimates whether the next word will fit the remaining space. If it is a little too short, he fattens the line by adding spacers between preceding words or letters. When the next word is too long, he cuts it in two and adds a hyphen.

It is not difficult to design an automatic typesetting machine that counts letters and spaces, but hyphenating words correctly is much harder to automate because it calls for knowledge of the illogical English language. Until recently newspapers had no choice except to retain their human typesetters, mostly for their nonmechanical skill in hyphenating words.

Merged Tapes. At the Los Angeles Times, reporters now write their stories on electric typewriters that simultaneously produce ordinary typescript and paper tapes that carry the same words in a code of perforations. When the edited copy is ready to be set in metal type, a typist reads it and makes a second perforated tape that tells in code how each line has been changed. The two tapes are run through a "merging" machine that produces a corrected tape. Under a slightly different system, a clean typescript and a correctly perforated tape are made in one operation—after the story is edited.

The tape is fed to a computer, which sucks it up at inhuman speed, measuring the width of letters and counting the spaces in a swift stream of words. When it gets near the end of a line, it does what a human typesetter would do, adding spaces if necessary to fill out the line. When it comes to a word that has to be hyphenated, which happens about every five lines, it hesitates momentarily while it consults a quick-access memory. If the word has a recognizable prefix or a familiar ending, such as -ing or -tion, the memory tells the computer in millionths of a second how to hyphenate correctly.

No Hands. If the word resists such straightforward treatment, the computer consults a dictionary of up to 300.000 words recorded on magnetic disks or tape. If the troublesome word is in the recorded dictionary, the computer is told how to hyphenate it in about eighty one-thousandths sec. If not. the computer gives up. chops it arbitrarily in two and leaves any errors to be corrected by a proofreader. Generally the machine hums along for long periods without being stumped, justifying 3 lines per sec. At this rate, it handles an 8-column newspaper page of solid print in 7½ min. The computer's product is a justified tape that can be fed to typesetting machines. Without further human intervention, it turns the reporter's story into lines of type.