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Computer printing history question: Why is imposition such a pain? At what level is “a page” so different from “this graphic” that imposition is still handled by different software than the rest of page layout?
Historical quirks and links to explanations, vague memories of subtle bugs, all welcome.
#printing #layout #typesetting (not using imposition as a hashtag because it's a lively one with a different meaning)
@clew I don't have any real explanation, but my personal theory is that at some point post-letterpress (maybe even earlier?), layout had developed into a more specialized (and maybe more standardised?) set of skills, meaning the "people doing layout" became more and more removed from "people doing the printing/bookmaking".
While layout moved towards "design" and thus became associated with "art" and more "academic" education paths, imposition remained the area of printers, the trades and thus a seperate path of specialised knowledge with seperate standards.
While the two branches were and are in dialog, this divergence meant that as things went digital and specialised software had to be written for the two spheres it further solidified this split. (Since software with a narrower focus is faster to write and easier to maintain.)
As this specialised software became more and more powerful (and thus complex) it became even harder to learn both and so gave even more incentive to specialize and not look at the other branch, and so on and so forth.