The Varityper Headliner complimented the Varityper, a sophisticated typewriter with interchangeable fonts and the ability to justify text. The Varityper, introduced in the 1920s, was quite successful, but with its typewriter mechanism could handle only 6 to 12 point type. The Varityper Headliner could set 12 to 90 point text suitable for headlines, advertisements and similar applications (Messenger 2015).

The Varityper Headliner stored fonts as photographic negatives on large transparent plastic discs. In Varityper advertising, loading the disc was compared to loading a record on a gramophone (a common analogy used to convey familiarity and ease-of-use: see sewing machine cams, slide carousels and tape cartridges, for example). Each disk held only one font. The depth of the notches on the circumference corresponded to the width of the associated characters. The typesetter operated the machine by hand, printing one character at a time to a 35 mm strip of photopaper. As the type was set, the strip was fed automatically to a developing tank. Afterwards, the strip could be cut up for paste-up and the resulting layout photographed to create a lithographic plate.

The Varityper company survived until the arrival of digital typesetting, at which point typesetting became the responsibility of authors and designers using WordPerfect and other composition software along with high resolution laser printers. The Varityper company suffered from the innovator's dilemma (Christensen 1997): "No one at VT could get interested in that new market because none of their existing customers had any interest in it" (Polt 2012).