4 Saturday, July 2, 2016
Celebrating 120 Years — THE WINCHESTER STAR
COMPOSING & PREPRESS
A Linotype operator works in the composing room at The Winchester Star. Linotype machines were miniature type foundries. Individual letters were selected on a keyboard. Once a row of letter molds was set, molten lead would flow into the molds and cast a “line-o-type.”
This was the composing room of The Star in 1943 at the 33 W. Boscawen St. office. This was during the hot-metal phase of newspaper production. To the right is a long row of partially completed pages. A page was assembled within a metal frame called a chase, which sat on a heavy metal cart. Inside this frame the page elements, such as cast type slugs, photo engravings, and lead spacers, were assembled and finally locked into place.
Lacy Mullens, compositor and operator, selects individual letters from a type case and places them into a composing stick in March 1946 in The Star’s 33 W. Boscawen St. office. Hot-metal typesetting, using Linotype machines, had replaced hand-set type for most of the text in the Star since 1907, but for tasks requiring a variety of typefaces, the old type cases and skilled compositors were still in demand.
A page of the Winchester Star is locked into its chase, or metal frame, in the composing room of The Star at 2 N. Kent St., in Winchester.
Once The Star made the switch to offset printing in 1964 (referred to as cold type), the composing room underwent a dramatic change as the Linotype machines were removed. In this image from the early 1970s, the workflows were focused on typing and paste-up. Typing was done on typewriter-like machines that perforated punch tape. The punch tape was then loaded into Compugraphics phototypesetting machines, which can be seen at left in the rear of the room, that would create galleys of text though a photo development process. Photographs and graphics also were processed through halftone and photoduplication processes. All of these elements were then placed on makeup pages — a process called paste-up, as seen on the foreground table — using wax to adhere the trimmed photographic paper elements to the gridded sheets. These paste-ups would then be photographed with a large camera, and the resulting negative used to produce a printing plate. Employees in this photo were (at rear, from left to right) Sherry Bosley, Connie Spaid, Alice Shaw, Toni Law, Joanne Muia, and (foreground) Pat Brill and Bud Cooper.
In this image from the early 1990s, an HP Vectra desktop computer (right) sits next to a Compugraphics photostypsetting terminal. The computer was loaded with the Dewar editorial system, a DOS-based program that formatted text and archived articles. Text was printed from laser printers for use in page paste-up.
Gayle Motley works on an ad for Wilkins’ Shoe Center in 1996 in The Star’s production department. Macintosh computers came to The Star around 1986 and were first used to draw and design news graphics and then to type-set help wanted ads. By the time this photo was taken, all the advertisements at The Star were being typed and designed on Macintosh computers using QuarkXPress software.
From 1998 to 2009, these imagesetters were used to create film negatives of the paper’s pages. Pages were designed on computers using desktop publishing software, and then the pages were digitally “ripped” through a Raster Image Processor server. The resulting detailed image of the page was exposed onto film in the ECRM imagesetter (left portion) which was then developed and output by the processing unit at right. The page negative would then be used to burn an image onto a printing plate.
Pressman Jimmy Dicks picks up an aluminum printing plate on June 20 that has been processed by The Star’s Kodak Trendsetter NEWS platesetter. The platesetters, installed at The Star in 2009, use a laser to etch the page images onto printing plates. In the background is the monitor for the computer server that is connected to the platesetter. The plate is a Kodak Sonara NEWS process-free plate which does not require additional washing prior to being placed on the press. The plate only needs to be punched and the edges bent and then it is ready for printing.
Editor Melissa Davis stands next to Compugraphics phototypsetting equipment at the Star in the early 1990s. Phototypesetting had moved beyond punch tape to these computer-like terminals (in background) on which text was typed and then transmitted to the large box-like units where it was exposed onto photographic paper. The photographic paper was then fed into a developer (at right). After a series of chemical baths, it emerged ready for paste-up. In this image, next to the typesetting terminals, are new desktop computers as The Star was transitioning away from phototypesetting.
Copy editor Melanie Livingston designs a page using Adobe InDesign layout software on June 22. The Star transitioned to digital page design, a process called pagination, in late 1997 with the installation of the Good News layout and database system. As a result of pagination, editors began assembling their own pages. After several upgrades of the GN software, The Star moved to a new editorial database in 2016 with the installation of APT’s Falcon Editorial and subsequently shifted its page layout workflow to InDesign.
The Star composing room in 1996, as compositors Pat Brill (from left) and Brenda Sherwood assemble pages. Photoduplication equipment had given way to desktop computers and laser printers at this point, but the final paste-up of pages was still dependent on scissors, X-Acto knives and border tape, as neatly trimmed text, graphics and half-toned photographs were adhered to gridded makeup pages. This space in the 2 N. Kent St. building was originally the press room, and later the newsroom, before housing the page composition area. SCOTT MASON/The Winchester Star