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I worked for a small town newspaper in the early 90’s. We used Macs and a laser printer to print out the main articles in column format. We had a headline print

I worked for a small town newspaper in the early 90’s. We used Macs and a laser printer to print out the main articles in column format. We had a headline printer like the one they describe. We would then wax up the articles and headlines, and cut and paste them onto the layout board. The layout board was then photographed and turned into a 1:1 photo negative. We left room for photos, which were processed separately and taped into place on the negatives. The completed negatives were combined into two-page sheets and used to expose printing plates. We would start the compositing process around 10AM on press days, and newspapers would be coming off the presses by around 2:00.

Finnucane 9y ago
In the '90s I worked for a weekly paper with a similar process, layout in Quark, then final pasteup on boards. Before that, I worked for a magazine with a Compugraphic typesetter, but by then, it had a PC-based front end for the compositor. I got pretty good with an X-Acto knife. For the halftones, I would paste in the FPOs, and the printer would strip in the film as you describe.
russellbeattie 9y ago
Hah! I worked for a small town newspaper in NH at the same time and we did the same exact thing. My college newspaper as well. The laser printers at the time just weren't good enough for photos (probably the scanners and storage as well), so those were processed by a different machine and stuck on at the last minute. These were the days of QuarkXPress and having souped up Mac LEs plugged into massive black and white monitors for layout. A single change in a classified ad could take a minute or two to repaginate.
- URSpider94 9y ago
  The main difference being that we didn’t use Quark for layout, we used MacWrite, I think, and would literally size our articles to 1-, 2- or 3-column width and then print them as one continuous column. We did all of our layout by hand instead of in the computer, so we’d cut up the paper and flow the columns into the layout on the board. Quark definitely existed by then (I had used PageMaker at my high school newspaper to do the same task in years before). I think the paper stayed with manual layout because it would let a group of us collaborate on laying out the 5-10 editorial pages over a period of an hour or two.

Finnucane 9y ago

In the '90s I worked for a weekly paper with a similar process, layout in Quark, then final pasteup on boards. Before that, I worked for a magazine with a Compugraphic typesetter, but by then, it had a PC-based front end for the compositor. I got pretty good with an X-Acto knife. For the halftones, I would paste in the FPOs, and the printer would strip in the film as you describe.

russellbeattie 9y ago

Hah! I worked for a small town newspaper in NH at the same time and we did the same exact thing. My college newspaper as well. The laser printers at the time just weren't good enough for photos (probably the scanners and storage as well), so those were processed by a different machine and stuck on at the last minute. These were the days of QuarkXPress and having souped up Mac LEs plugged into massive black and white monitors for layout. A single change in a classified ad could take a minute or two to repaginate.

URSpider94 9y ago
The main difference being that we didn’t use Quark for layout, we used MacWrite, I think, and would literally size our articles to 1-, 2- or 3-column width and then print them as one continuous column. We did all of our layout by hand instead of in the computer, so we’d cut up the paper and flow the columns into the layout on the board. Quark definitely existed by then (I had used PageMaker at my high school newspaper to do the same task in years before). I think the paper stayed with manual layout because it would let a group of us collaborate on laying out the 5-10 editorial pages over a period of an hour or two.