Typography History Timeline

No. Woodblock printing originated in China by at least the 8th century CE (such as the Diamond Sūtra, 868 CE), and Bi Sheng invented ceramic movable type around 1045 CE. Korean printers used cast bronze movable metal type by 1234 CE (such as the Jikji, 1377 CE). Gutenberg’s revolutionary contribution around 1450 CE was the European movable metal type printing press: combining an adjustable handheld mold, durable lead-tin-antimony alloy, oil-based ink, and a screw press for mass book production.

Old Style (e.g. Garamond, c. 1540) has a diagonal calligraphic stress, low contrast, and organic bracketed serifs derived from handwritten pen strokes. Transitional (e.g. Baskerville, 1757) moved toward vertical stress and sharper contrast on smooth wove paper. Didone / Modern (e.g. Bodoni, 1788) pushed punchcutting to razor-thin unbracketed hairlines and extreme vertical contrast.

Indian writing originated with Ashokan Brahmi script around the 3rd century BCE, from which all modern Indic scripts (Devanagari, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, etc.) evolved as abugidas. Printing in India began with Portuguese missionary presses in Goa (1556 CE), followed by Charles Wilkins casting the first Bengali metal types in 1778 and Gangadhar Bhattacharya publishing the first illustrated Indian newspaper in 1818.

Before Unicode (1991), computers used fragmented, incompatible 8-bit code pages (ASCII, Shift-JIS, ISCII), causing text garbling across borders. Unicode established a universal 16-bit code space where every character in every major human writing system received an immutable, standardized hexadecimal code point.