Editing News design (section)

== Process  ==
Designers typically use [[desktop publishing]] [[software]] to arrange the elements on the pages directly. In the past, before digital pre-press pagination, designers used precise "lay out dummies" to direct the exact layout of elements for each page.

A complete layout dummy was required for designating proper column widths by which a [[typesetter]] would set type, and arrange columns of text. Layout also required the calculation of lengths of copy (text in "[[column inch]]es"), for any chosen width.

Much of the variance and incoherence of early newspapers was because last minute corrections were exclusively handled by typesetters. With photographic printing process, typesetting gave way to [[paste-up]], whereby columns of type were printed by machines ([[Phototypesetting|phototypesetters]]) on high-resolution film for paste-up on photographed final prints. These prints in turn were "shot to negative" with a large format production camera &mdash;directly to steel-[[emulsion]] photographic plates.

Though paste-up put an end to cumbersome typesetting, this still required planned layouts and set column widths.  Photographic plates are (still) wrapped on printing drums to directly apply ink to [[newsprint]] (paper).
In the mid-1990s, the paste-up process gave way to the [[direct to plate]] process, where computer-paginated files were optically transmitted directly to the photographic plate. Replacing several in-between steps in newspaper production, direct to plate pagination allowed for much more flexibility and precision than before. Designers today still used column grid layouts only with layout software, such as Adobe InDesign or Quark.