Before Linotype and hot-metal machines, and long before digital fonts, every book, newspaper, and pamphlet was set by hand. A compositor would pick up individual pieces of metal type — sorts — from a wooden type case, and set them into a composing stick, one line at a time. It was a genuine craft, practiced for five centuries, and almost no interactive tool lets you feel that process. Most web tools jump straight to "type text, see font." This one reconstructs the actual workflow of the pre-digital printing trade.
An interactive hand-typesetting simulator. You paste a manuscript, then "set" it by clicking sorts in the type case (just as a compositor reached for each letter). The sorts land in a composing stick, arranged the way real type is — mirror-image and in reverse order, because in letterpress the type must face the paper, not the reader. When your lines are composed, you lock the form up and pull a proof from the press, rendered as a period-style page with your chosen typeface, column layout, and optional drop-cap.
The type case is organized like a real case: an upper (capital) section, a lower (small letter) section, and a row of spaces and fuds (spacing sorts). Each sort is a button; clicking it appends that character to the active line in the composing stick. The stick stores lines as arrays of character codes, rendered as little metal sorts. Because a compositor sets type left-to-right in the stick, the rendered proof reverses the order so the page reads correctly. "Match to source" compares your composed text against the manuscript to score accuracy. The press animation and the proof render are pure client-side DOM/CSS — no server, no dependencies.
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