Letraset is a company which manufactures sheets of artwork elements which can be transferred to artwork being prepared; see the article on screentone for details. The name Letraset was often used to refer generically to sheets of dry transferrable lettering of any brand. This technique was very widespread for lettering and other elements before the advent of the computer techniques of word processing and desktop publishing. Before computer techniques, when artwork was prepared by hand, Letraset sheets were available with letters in a large range of typefaces, styles, and sizes, symbols, and other graphic elements. The letters could be transferred one by one to artwork being prepared, a tedious job. The alternative, also tedious and requiring skill, was to do the lettering by hand. The name Letraset comes from the lettering application, once ubiquitous but now rarely used, although still available. Currently, Letraset's line of print patterns and textures are more commonly used than its lettering. Letraset saw a decline in the sales of their materials and in the early 1990s moved into the desktop publishing industry, releasing software packages for the Macintosh such as ImageStudio and ColorStudio. These never saw widespread success, however Letraset did become a player in the digital font market, releasing many of their fonts that had been popular on the dry transfer sheets in formats such as PostScript.
