A California job case is a kind of type case : a compartmentalized wooden box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing . It was the most popular and accepted of the job case designs in America. The California job case took its name from the Pacific Coast location of the foundries that made the case popular.
15-652: The defining characteristic of the California job case is the layout, documented by J. L. Ringwalt in the American Encyclopaedia of Printing in 1871, as used by San Francisco printers. This modification of a previously popular case, the Italic, it was claimed reduced the compositor's hand travel as he set the pieces of type into his composing stick by more than half a mile per day. In the previous convention, upper- and lowercase type were kept in separate cases, or trays. This
30-403: A galley before being locked into a forme and printed. Many composing sticks have one adjustable end, allowing the length of the lines and consequent width of the page or column to be set, with spaces and quadrats of different sizes being used to make up the exact width. Early composing sticks often had a fixed measure , as did many used in setting type for newspapers, which were fixed to
45-510: A lower-case p , followed by the points number, for example: 5p6 represents 5 picas and 6 points, or 5 1 ⁄ 2 picas. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) defined by the World Wide Web Consortium use pc as the abbreviation for pica ( 1 ⁄ 6 of an inch), and pt for point ( 1 ⁄ 72 of an inch). The pica is also used in measuring the font capacity and is applied in the process of copyfitting . The font length
60-450: A number of typefaces, and typefoundries often provided the number of characters per pica for each type in their specimen catalogs. Similar tables exist as well with which one can estimate the number of characters per pica knowing the lower-case alphabet length. The typographic pica should not be confused with the Pica font of the typewriters , which means a font where 10 typed characters make up
75-417: A skilled typesetter could "read" the text set by another typesetter, just by watching the typesetter remove type from the case, seeing from which compartments the letters were taken. In addition to placing the letters most commonly used in the easiest positions for the typesetter to reach, the compartments for different characters vary in size according to the frequency of usage. Thus, for setting English text,
90-470: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Pica (typography) The pica is a typographic unit of measure corresponding to approximately 1 ⁄ 6 of an inch , or from 1 ⁄ 68 to 1 ⁄ 73 of a foot . One pica is further divided into 12 points . In printing, three pica measures are used: Publishing applications such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress represent pica measurements with whole-number picas left of
105-417: Is measured there by the number of characters per pica ( cpp ). As books are most often printed with proportional fonts, cpp of a given font is usually a fractional number. For example, an 11-point font (like Helvetica ) may have 2.4 cpp, thus a 5-inch (30-pica) line of a usual octavo-sized (6×8 in) book page would contain around 72 characters (including spaces). There have existed copyfitting tables for
120-469: Is why capital letters are called uppercase and the minuscules are lowercase . The combined case became popular during the western expansion of the United States in the 19th century. A California job case consists of 89 compartments, most of which are assigned to specific letters, spacers, ligatures and quads . In variations on the layout, additional symbols are sorted in the unassigned compartments at
135-403: The "e" box is the largest, and the "j", "k", "q", "x", and "z" boxes are the smallest. Other large compartments in the California job case hold spaces used to separate words or to fill out lines of type, including em and en spaces. An em space has the width of the point size of the type (i.e., as wide as it is high); an en space has half that width (i.e., half as wide as it is high; in most types,
150-421: The case, in order to make typesetting more efficient, the inventor arranged the compartments according to the frequency of use of the letters. The more frequently used letters ( t , n , e , i , o , r ) are arranged in a rough circle directly in front of the typesetter; the less frequently used letters and characters are farther away. The arrangement of the letters in the California job case became so common that
165-437: The more frequently used letters in convenient reach of the typesetter, with ligatures and spaces of different widths nearby to improve efficiency. Each size and style of typeface is kept in its own tray (case), and trays are kept in a cabinet with slots making each tray a removable drawer. The cabinet may offer the typesetter a work surface at a convenient height, such as in a composer's work stand. Regardless of who invented
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#1732854549274180-558: The nineteenth century, for setting wood letter and other large sizes of type for display. In the industrial age, composing sticks were manufactured by many companies, but notably in America by the H. B. Rouse company, which made composing sticks that were adjustable to the half pica , as well as a stick containing a micrometer that was infinitely adjustable. Some sticks were marked in agates as well, to aid in newspaper and advertisement composition. This typography -related article
195-432: The numerals have the same width as an en space, to allow easy alignment of numerical data in columns). Typically, a 3-to-em space is used between words (three of these spaces placed side by side have the width of an em space). Composing stick In letterpress printing and typesetting , a composing stick is a tray-like tool used to assemble pieces of metal type into words and lines, which are then transferred to
210-596: The top of the case. Minuscule ( lowercase ) letters, punctuation and spaces of various widths are on the left; capital ( uppercase ) letters are on the right, and numerals and some other symbols are at the top. The position and size of the compartments for lowercase letters vary according to the frequency of occurrence of the letters . The compartments for uppercase letters are uniform in size and ordered from A to Z , except for J and U , which were not used by early English printers, so they are assigned compartments following Z . This organization keeps larger quantities of
225-487: The width of a standard column, when newspapers were still composed by hand. The compositor takes the pieces of type from the boxes (compartments) of the type case and places them in the composing stick, working from left to right and placing the letters upside-down with the nick to the top. Early composing sticks were made of wood, but later iron, brass, steel, aluminium, pewter and other metals were used. Wooden composing sticks continued to be made in large sizes into
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