Setting a page of type in hot metal

What was ceded is turning a manuscript into justified lines of metal at speed, a trade that took years to learn and carried its own vocabulary and its own errors. The Linotype operator broke words, adjusted spacing and corrected as he went, and all of that judgment was written into software within a decade. Newspapers went from about fourteen lines a minute to a thousand, and the composing rooms emptied. What is not ceded is typographic judgment: choosing a face, deciding what a page should look like, seeing that a headline is a line too long. Composition became a machine task, design did not.