How tonight's front page gets set — the ink, the faces, and the engine that re-flows the sheet under your hands.
The Early Edition is a fictional city broadsheet, first on the street since 1911. The desk is for the night sub-editor: swap the lead story, size the headline, drag the column measure, re-crop the halftone — then put the page to bed.
The single job of the page is to make real typesetting feel physical. Every choice re-flows live under the same rules a stone sub once worked by hand: a deeper headline steals a leg of copy, a tighter measure buys words back, and whatever won't fit jumps to Page A7. Nothing here is decorative — it is all load-bearing type.
A press pulls exactly three things: the tone of the paper, the black it lays down, and — on a good day — a single spot colour. The palette holds to that discipline; everything else is the dark of the composing room.
High-contrast Didone with real thick-thin drama. It carries the masthead and every headline — the moment of typographic bravery the page is built around, set as large as the measure allows.
An optical-size text serif that stays honest at 13.5px in a justified 100-pixel column. Its italic sets the decks and cutlines without shouting.
The one voice that isn't the newspaper. Every control, kicker, folio and credit line is Plex, so the reader always knows what is the page and what is the desk.
There is no HTML text flow on the sheet. A hidden canvas measures every word in the exact body face, and a line-breaker packs words into column slots — hyphenating long words, justifying by distributing the slack, then spilling whatever is left down the next leg and, when the page runs out, into a "Continued on Page A7" jump. Headlines are measured the same way so a size change genuinely re-breaks the head and pushes body copy off the page. Change the measure, the head, or the lead, and the whole broadsheet re-sets in a single synchronous pass — the stone sub's craft, in the browser.
Each story's photo is drawn as a greyscale scene into an offscreen canvas, then re-sampled on a rotated 45° grid into ink dots whose radius tracks local darkness — a real newspaper halftone, no raster image anywhere. Dragging inside the frame re-crops the source; device pixel ratio is capped at 2 and the dots re-render only when the crop actually moves.
"Put it to bed" plates the page (an inverted, desaturated filter), rolls a light bar down the sheet, stamps it, and counts the print run up from nothing. It is the only scripted motion on the page, and it is skipped entirely under reduced-motion — the plate and run number simply appear.