Laying Out Magazines Using Wax And Bromides
| Field | Publishing |
| Went Obsolete | Mid-1990s |
| Made Obsolete By | PostScript, Aldus Page Maker, QuarkXPress |
| Knowledge Assumed | A good eye, ability with a scalpel, typesetting, photoprocessing |
| When useful | Retro design, antiquing forgeries |
Newspapers and magazines used to be created using long phototypeset columns of text (known as “galleys”) which were then cut to appropriate lengths and pasted down on the layout board with hot wax. Lines, drawings and photographs were also pasted onto the page with the same method. Layout with this method required a steady hand, as mistakes could ruin the entire layout and force the typesetter to start anew. Also see Cutting and Pasting by Hand.
Obsolete or arcane tools involved in this process include:
Burnishers and rollers - a stylus or roller for rubbing your wax galleys, headlines, linetape and photo screens to make sure they stick to the flats
Line tape - sticky-tape spools of lines of various point sizes and designs, used to cut lines for picture and page borders
Proportion wheel - like a rotary slide rule, used to determine the percentage change in the size of a photo when you shot it in a line camera.
Non-repro pens - a light blue pen for marking up changes on a layout flat. The colour isn't visible to a line camera, so it isn't picked up when you shoot the image for a plate.
Letraset stencils
This process made hot-metal typesetting obsolete, and was widely used until Apple and Adobe began the Desktop Publishing revolution with PostScript, and programs like Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress made digital typesetting a reality.
