Photosetting in Japan

[Dave Hughes]

Simon Goode, from the London Centre for Book Arts, has been visiting the Print Museum in Tokyo and took some great pictures of some early Japanese photosetting equipment.

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[Mechanic]

I have posted this before. I thought it was worth reposting here.

Producing single Japanese photo typesetting characters on a keyboard operated for this purpose is pretty straightforward.

People look at the Linotype keyboard and are a little taken aback by the 90 character keyboard, until you explain the layout. This is nothing compared to a keyboard that I saw, when I visited  Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, in the  1970's. The keyboard was used to operate their Hell Digiset.

The keyboard had 240 keys. Each key could produce four different characters. The shifts to access the various characters were controlled by two foot pedals. None activated, first position. Left down, second position. Right down, third position. Both down, fourth position.