drive out

In letterpress and relief printing, to drive out meant to compress text on a page by reducing the physical space each character occupied. A typesetter achieved this by selecting narrower typefaces, reducing the white space between letters (called tracking), decreasing the leading (vertical space between lines), or tightening the margins. The goal was economic: fitting more content into fewer pages meant lower paper costs and reduced postage for printed matter.

The term reflects the mechanical reality of metal type composition. A typesetter literally drove the characters closer together in the composing stick, a handheld frame where individual letters were arranged by hand. When space on a page was precious, the compositor would use condensed fonts, which had narrower character widths than the standard roman or italic fonts. Alternatively, the compositor would reduce interline spacing by inserting thinner metal strips called leads (pronounced leds) between rows of type.

Driving out was common in newspaper work, where column widths were fixed and editorial content had to fit around advertisements. It also appeared in book printing when a publisher wanted to reduce page count. However, aggressive driving out damaged readability. Tight letterspacing and cramped lines fatigued readers; excessive driving out could render text nearly illegible and was considered a mark of poor composition practice.

The term became obsolete with the shift from metal type to phototypesetting in the 1960s and 1970s, then to digital typography. Digital systems made compression trivial: a designer could simply scale a font horizontally or adjust point size and line height with a parameter. The craft and deliberation involved in mechanical driving out disappeared. Today the concept survives in typography as condensing or compressing a typeface, but without the physical labor and tactile judgment that once defined the practice.