Cold Type May 2026

Characters are projected onto light-sensitive film or paper to create a "master" for offset printing.

Beyond technical printing, the phrase has become a symbol for high-quality journalism and literature: In cold type - Columbia Journalism Review Cold Type

This method drastically reduced the time between writing an article and seeing it in print, making it the standard for 20th-century newsrooms like the Washington Star-News . Characters are projected onto light-sensitive film or paper

For nearly a century, the printing world was dominated by "hot metal" typesetting, where machines like the Linotype cast individual lines of text from molten lead. In contrast, refers to methods that do not involve heat, such as phototypesetting and digital composition. such as phototypesetting and digital composition.