put up

To put up is to reset standing type or digital matter from lowercase to capital letters, reversing or inverting the case of the original text. In hand composition, this meant physically replacing each lowercase letter sorts with their capital equivalents in the composing stick. In modern digital workflows, it involves selecting text and applying a case transformation command to uppercase.

The term belongs to the compositor's vocabulary and appears most often in the context of correcting proofs or fulfilling client specifications that arrive after initial composition. A proof might come back marked "put up the subheads" or "put up the opening line." The work ranges from selective changes, such as capitalizing proper nouns that were missed, to wholesale conversion of entire passages. In metal type, this was time-consuming because sorts had to be found, measured, and inserted into the existing line without disrupting spacing or alignment.

Variants and practical constraints

The reverse operation, setting capitals in lowercase, is called "put down" or sometimes "reduce." Both terms reflect the physical act of reaching up or down into the type case to draw sorts. The expense of putting up or down depended on the volume of change and the urgency of the deadline. Printers sometimes charged separately for case corrections beyond a small allowance, since the work consumed composition time without increasing page count.

In letterpress and linotype era, putting up text that had been set solid in lowercase could introduce spacing problems if kerning pairs or ligatures had been handled differently in the original composition. The compositor had to verify that caps fit the line length and that no unintended breaks or rivers of space appeared. Digital tools bypass these hazards but still require attention to formatting rules: sentence case, title case, and all-caps styling may affect hyphenation and line breaks downstream.

Though the term survives in editorial and design contexts, it has become less concrete as print workflow has digitized. A production editor may still request "put up that heading," but the instruction now goes to a designer working in InDesign or a CMS rather than to a compositor at a type bank. The vocabulary endures because case decisions often emerge late in production, when text must be modified without resetting the entire job.