The practice of arranging varying sizes and weights of periods, colons, and other point-like type characters to form a recognizable picture or portrait. Compositors built these images letter by letter in a standard composing stick, relying on the density of the points to create shading and tone. It served as a demonstration of extreme typesetting skill before halftone photoengraving became practical.
Heard on the job
The apprentice spent three days setting a portrait of the shop owner using pure stigmatypy.
Insider tip
Stigmatypy is essentially the letterpress ancestor of ASCII art, created entirely with metal punctuation sorts.