Dhani Ram Chatrik was born at Pasianwala in Sialkot district in 1876 and worked as a compositor before he became a poet and a printer.
He is the man who made Gurmukhi typography usable. He designed and cut improved Gurmukhi type at his Sudarshan Press at Amritsar and standardised forms that had been irregular since the missionary presses of the 1830s. Every Punjabi book printed in India for decades used his letters.
As a poet he brought Punjabi out of the qissa metres into modern lyric subjects and is usually placed with Bhai Vir Singh and Puran Singh as one of the founders of modern Punjabi poetry.
He was the first president of the Punjabi Sahit Sabha and worked to get Punjabi taught and published as a modern literary language rather than only a religious one.
A typesetter who redesigned the alphabet his language is written in, and then wrote in it, is not a common career.
He also published other people's work at his own risk, including early collections by writers who had no other route into print. That is the part of a printer's contribution that leaves no record.
Before that, Punjabi was printed from lithographed handwriting. The type he cut changed what a Punjabi book could be and how cheaply it could be made.
He was a poet as well and his collections are read, but the type is the larger contribution and it is the one nobody mentions.