Typesetting
Typesetting once literally meant the setting of type, that is, the arrangement by hand or machine of narrow slugs of metal, usually lead, bearing on their ends the raised images of individual characters. A readable text was produced when the set type was inked and pressed against paper. Today, however, the term typesetting often refers to computer methods for producing a printer-ready image of a document: that is, an image of the document exactly as it is supposed to look on paper. Here the word printer refers not to a desktop printer but to an industrial workshop that can produce a journal, bound book, or other printed object of professional quality. Printers no longer rely on moveable metal type to put ink on paper, but on flexible sheets of metal on which text and graphics have been produced as a raised pattern by photoresist techniques. These metal sheets are fixed to cylinders and rolled against paper at high speed.
Typesetting is thus located toward the end of the document-production process, just before actual printing. Word processing, on the other hand, is located at the other end of the process--the compositional or creative end. Word processors are computer applications used to record, display, organize, spell-check, and otherwise manipulate writing. Today's word processors can also incorporate graphics and Web links into the documents they produce, and will soon routinely incorporate sound and video as well.
Because word processors allow users to control so many aspects of the final appearance of their documents, there can be no neat dividing line between typesetting and word processing. However, the absence of a line does not always mean the absence of a difference. Typesetting and word processing remain distinct activities. One important distinction is that word processing consists, primarily, of writing, which is a personal, creative act--a specialized form of speech or conversation--and can therefore receive only marginal assistance from a machine. A word processor, for all its hundreds of features, is primarily passive, a fancy piece of paper. Typesetting, on the other hand, involves the final arrangement of all the visual elements of a document, including font, justification, spacing, margins, indents, captions, character spacing, section heads, and many more. Professional typesetters have generally devoted thousands of hours to developing expertise in their field, and produce professional results; word-processor users who attempt to typeset complex documents (or who over-embellish simple documents) usually produce obviously amateur results.
On the positive side, the fact that word processors give their users control over many of the aspects of document appearance, and to print their documents on desktop devices, makes it possible for users to quickly produce highly legible letters, reports, proposals, and more--a positive result. An outstanding negative result is that untold hours are wasted on amateur typesetting that could have been spent on productive work (or on breaks from work). This wastage probably contributes its share to what economists have long called the "productivity paradox"--the fact that although the amount of computing power purchased by U.S. businesses has increased by a factor of hundreds since the 1970s, white collar productivity (profit produced per worker-hour) has by many measures not increased at all--it may even have decreased. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow said in the early 1990s, "we see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics." The time wasted by many word-processor users on irrelevant typesetting is a typical result of the computer's tendency to make the unnecessary easy.
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