A historic piece-rate typesetting term describing copy that is fast and easy to set, allowing a compositor to earn more money for less effort. It usually referred to pages with wide margins, large blank spaces, extensive leading, or inserted illustrations that required fewer individual characters to fill the galley.
Hand me that poetry manuscript, I need some fat copy after spending all morning on those dense legal tables.
Also heard as
- fat matter
Related terms
Lean
Describing text or copy that is difficult and slow to set by hand.
Compose
The historic process of hand-setting individual metal type characters into lines of text.
Take
A specific portion of manuscript given to a typesetter to compose at one time.
Galley
A shallow, three-sided metal tray used to hold lines of set type before they are made up into pages.