castingoff

Before the days of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) publishing programs such as Quark Xpress and Microsoft Publisher, “sub-editors” on newspapers and magazines estimated the amout of copy required to fill any given space on a page by “casting off”, the practice of counting words to estimate how many column inches they would fill. This consisted of counting the number of words and using a conversion factor to estimate how many characters this constituted.

A general rule of thumb was to assume that the average word was six characters long; therefore, counting the number of whole words and multiplying by six gave the number of characters in any piece of copy. One could then estimate the length of copy by applying a conversion factor based on the number of characters per line for each standard column width, which was usually worked out beforehand - wider columns requiring more character to fill a line.

Using this measure it was possible to aproximate the number of words to edit out to make any given story fit the space given to it by the page designer.

In practice, those most skilled in “casting off” – the peculiar mental maths derived from experience and cranial dexterity – required the least bodging to get the final story to fit.

Some people were just better at it. The rest required good compositors who could “baste” out the words to fit, or a skilled “stone sub” who could edit out more words before the page went to press.

The introduction of computer publishing systems meant that it was possible to tweak words and even character width to make them fit in a line on screen long beofre anything was committed to the printing press.