Economical typesetting from small computer text files

摘要

Many individuals and small organizations face the problem of how to publish good looking documents at an affordable price. Today's technology offers a number of affordable tools that can help them: offset lithography, film ribbon type-writers, and now small computers with word processing software. But for many people, typeset quality is still out of reach. Typesetting remains a labor intensive service requiring expensive hardware and special skills.

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We will look at a new option for those who want high quality at low cost: a typesetting service that works from text files prepared on word processing computers. By allowing the user to do his own keyboarding, such a service eliminates the labor-intensive (and expensive) part of the process.

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We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of computer typesetting---economic and otherwise---and some of the aesthetic problems it presents.