New York based Photo-Lettering, Inc. (affectionately known as PLINC) pioneered photocomposition starting in 1936, and lasted until the desktop publishing era.

Their main business was setting headlines and advertising text from an amazing library of over 10,000 type designs, the largest library from a single foundry before or since. A great variety of optical effects could enhance the work, made possible by many different lenses. (Now every Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw user has the same power available to them, only now more open to abuse...) In their later years they also offered text setting with about 1,000 fonts from the library.

Photo-Lettering designers included Bob Alonso, Vincent Pacella, Vic Caruso, and the master Ed Benguiat.

But for a lack of funds the company might have made the transition to digital. In the late 1980s they went out of business. A few of their original fonts were digitized in the 1990s and 2000s by ITC and Nick’s Fonts.

The most significant recent development was in April 2003, when House Industries announced they had purchased the entire physical assets of Photo-Lettering, material amounting to 1500 cubic ft (42 cubic meters). The plan, developed technically by Ken Barber, Christian Schwartz and Erik van Blokland, is to offer advanced typesetting of Photo-Lettering fonts by means of a website where parameters – layering, color control and multiple master interpolation over six axes – may be controlled by the customer. Much of this technology is beyond the scope of existing font formats such as OpenType.

New York based Photo-Lettering, Inc. (affectionately known as PLINC) pioneered photocomposition starting in 1936, and lasted until the desktop publishing era.