Printing was invented in China sometime in the 8th century AD, where the block printing was developed. The technique was quite simple: text and illustrations were were engraved in wooden blocks, inked and copied on paper. Europe first used block printing only in the 14th century.

The next step was the movable type, also invented in China, in the 11th century. Since the Chinese written language is based not on letters but ideograms, the printers had to use a great number of typefaces (as many as the ideograms) and this still represents a problem in such languages as Chinese, Japanese or Korean.

In Europe the same technique was invented by the German printer Johannes Gutenberg in the middle of the 15th century, and soon spread throughout the continent. Unlike block printing (where each "page" had to be engraved separately and once used had to be thrown away), the movable type used metallic pieces (each representing a letter) and the letters were assembled by hand to form a text. Of course the metallic pieces could be used over and over again, without much waste of time and material.

Not until 1886 was the linotype invented. By this technique, instead of assembling the metallic pieces by hand, a keyboard-driven device was used to cast lines of characters automatically. A further development brought about the monotype system, that made the typesetting procedure faster. All these mechanical devices were replaced  in the 1960s, when electronic means of composing pages became the standard procedure of the printing industry.