What do Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, 3Com Corp., the U.S. Congress, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the Boeing Co. and the Queen Elizabeth II have in common?
They use desktop equipment and software to produce publications.
With the growth of graphics and typesetting applications in the personal computer industry, you would expect that hundreds of small- and medium-size commercial publishers would be publishing from their desktops; but it is significant that other types of companies are also doing desktop publishing.
The goal of desktop publishing is to automate as many of the repetitive tasks in production work–the typesetting of text, the preparation of graphics and images and the manual task of pasting up pieces of typeset text and graphics–as possible.
The PC, laser printer and page makeup software can provide more flexibility in design and layout–last-minute changes are not only possible, but also easy, right up to printing time. Comments and editing changes are more easily managed when the manuscript is stored in an electronic form. Line art can be precise and revisable in electronic form and electronic page makeup is faster and easier to revise than manual paste-up.
The computer industry has discovered that desktop publishing is more attractive to the rank-and-file business person than to large newspaper, magazine and book publishers.
Many people are involved with publishing, whether or not they see themselves as publishers, because they are producing sales literature, marketing brochures, flyers, newsletters, advertisements, operating manuals or other business communications. Desktop publishing lets these people save production time and money by not using expensive production services. They also end up with a great deal of control over production.
Small publishers also can use the methods and compete with larger publishers in professional-looking publications.
How do corporations and organizations use desktop publishing?
Northwestern Mutual switched from conventional methods to using a program called PageMaker on an Apple Macintosh to produce an in-house technical newsletter and cut the production time in half. The company also found PageMaker useful for producing advertising flyers and transparencies for speeches.
Lawrence Livermore, 3Com and Boeing use it to produce large manuals, research reports and papers for scientific journals–even parts catalogues, department forms and other instructional materials.
The Queen Elizabeth II uses PageMaker to produce a daily world news bulletin. The news pages are put together into a PageMaker publication file in London, then transmitted by satellite to the liner where a laser printer prints 1,200 copies for the ship`s passengers.
Newspapers such as the State Journal (Charleston, W. Va.), Behind the Times (Corinth, Vt.) and Roll Call (the weekly newspaper for Congress) and magazines such as Publish!, Personal Publishing, Chartering Magazine and Balloon Life use desktop publishing equipment because it shortens the production cycle and saves money.
Even large publishers such as the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain and newspapers such as The Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the San Francisco Examiner and USA Today use desktop publishing hardware and software with their expensive newspaper publishing systems to produce graphics such as maps and charts.
The newspaper systems don`t offer the drawing programs available on the Macintosh, so the production staffs use Macs to prepare graphics, then drop them onto the finished pages done with the larger systems. Several of the papers prepare Macintosh graphics that can be transferred via telephone lines or satellite connections to remote production sites.
The desktop publishing phenomenon occurred when relatively inexpensive laser printers offering near-typeset quality text and graphics printing were introduced and connected to PCs. As a result, inexpensive publishing tools became available, which made it easier for people to do publishing production tasks without typesetting services and graphic design houses.
Graphics experts and consultants began using desktop publishing for design tasks and gave their clients the ability to do production work, or they perform that work for clients much more quickly and inexpensively.
Apple Computer Inc.`s Macintosh Plus and LaserWriter laser printer were heralded last year as the best components for desktop publishing. The arrival of PageMaker on the Mac was the first major step for desktop publishing, but Aldus Corp., the company that makes PageMaker, quickly developed an IBM PC AT version. That version just came out last month and industry experts are predicting that more PC AT and compatible computers will be used for publishing than ever before.
There are more than 8 million users of PCs and PC-compatible computers
(compared to 1 million Mac users), but the garden-variety IBM PC XTs (and clones) are not capable of running the best desktop publishing software unless they are upgraded to have at least 640K of memory, Enhanced Graphics Adaptors (or Hercules Monochrome Adaptors), mice and hard disks.
Some programs can run on a standard, mouse-less PC (as long as it has enough memory and a hard disk), but these programs–notably Byline, new from Ashton-Tate, which markets Framework, Multimate and dBASE II–offer less functions and flexibility than the top-of-the-line packages and are designed for occasional publishers who do not need extensive graphics.
To run the more sophisticated desktop publishing software, you need a computer that is more powerful than a PC XT. Organizations looking at desktop publishing are concluding that they need new computers so they don`t complicate tasks handled by existing computers.
Therefore, newcomers should realize that they may have to buy a new computer anyway. Apple and other computer manufacturers are banking on this strategy to sell new machines to current PC owners.
Apple also has competition from Atari Corp., which recently announced a PC-compatible computer and a $1,500 laser printer.
Atari`s low-priced computer and printer are not widely available and page makeup software has not appeared on the Atari, but the announcement of low-priced computers and laser printers may force others to lower their prices. This is despite the fact that desktop publishing equipment is considered cheap compared to dedicated publishing and office automation equipment. Commodore Business Machines has not attracted publishers to the Amiga personal computer, but that company also has its sights set on Apple`s widening market share.
International Business Machines Corp. recently announced that it will introduce powerful desktop machines based on the Intel 80386 processor that will be almost as powerful as mainframes.
Apple got the jump on IBM by announcing, in early March, the Macintosh II, a powerful PC based on the Motorola 68020 processor, which also provides mainframe-style performance. The Mac II is a very powerful desktop publishing machine, and many industry experts are concluding that IBM has fallen behind in the race to provide better personal computers.
The IBM-compatible clone manufacturers are not sitting still while IBM and Apple battle for supremacy in desktop publishing.
AST Research, maker of popular add-on boards for PCs and the new Mac II, has packaged a desktop publishing system for less than $9,000 based on its fast PC AT compatible computer and its TurboLaser printer and TurboScan scanner. A comparable Macintosh-based system also would cost about $9,000, but AST is betting that corporations will buy PC AT compatibles rather than Macs. Recently, Hewlett-Packard Corp. and Digital Equipment Corp. announced similarly packaged systems for desktop publishing, based on their computers and laser printers.
The laser printer of choice for desktop publishing is still the Apple LaserWriter, due to its compatibility with typesetting machines from Allied Linotype and Compugraphic that use the PostScript page description language.
You can make up pages on a Macintosh or a PC (a LaserWriter can connect to both), print ”proof” pages on the LaserWriter to make sure they are correct and finished, then ”print” the same publication on a typesetting machine for much higher resolution (more dots per inch).
Publications produced this way look no different than those produced through conventional, and more expensive, methods.
Other PostScript-compatible printers are available from QMS, Texas Instruments, Digital and Dataproducts. IBM also has announced that it is readying a laser printer that will offer PostScript compatibility.
Color laser printers are also on the horizon, but they are likely to be too expensive (more than $20,000) at first and not useful for producing color separations used for volume printing.
A page makeup program plays a central role in a desktop publishing system and is used as a finishing tool for preparing text and graphics for presentation and publication.
You would use a word-processing program and a graphics program to create the text and graphics, then use a page makeup program to bring the elements together on a page.
The page makeup program lets you adjust the design of the page at the same time that you are placing the elements. This electronic pasteup offers many benefits over traditional methods.
Aldus` PageMaker and another page makeup program called Ventura Publisher, marketed by Xerox Corp., are the primary page makeup programs for desktop publishing on PC ATs and compatibles. PageMaker and Letraset`s ReadySetGo are the major ones for the Mac.
PageMaker is the quintessential desktop publishing program because it epitomizes the paradigm that artists and designers use in conventional page makeup. Text and graphic images are ”pasted” onto an electronic page and cropped with an electronic ”knife.” Blocks of text can be moved to fit around graphics.
The metaphor of text threading is close to the physical task of threading typeset galleys through a layout. Designers and graphic artists have no trouble understanding how PageMaker works; the precision of its rulers and various page displays make it easy to line up elements without a T-square and light table.
The paradigm works for beginners as well and gives people who could never draw a straight line the ability to mix text and graphics on well-designed pages. Coupled with the Macintosh computer or the Microsoft Corp.`s Windows system for PC ATs, which handles file-and-disk management as well as program execution, PageMaker fits neatly into the windows-style operating system and is easy to learn.
An increasing trend of word processor vendors is to offer simple page makeup features in word-processing programs, so that you can produce simple pages (such as a two-column research report) with some inserted graphics.
Word-processing features also are found in the page makeup programs such as Ventura Publisher and ReadySetGo. Ventura Publisher will let you changes text that was created in another word processor and save the text in the file format used by that word processor (or even another file format so you can convert text to another word processor).
Despite the trend of adding page makeup features in word-processing programs, page makeup vendors are doing very well. Aldus, for example, reported that it has sold more than 50,000 copies of PageMaker.
This is just the beginning, as market analysts concur that the desktop publishing market will grow to about $5 billion in sales by 1990. In 1985, the last year for which complete figures are available, sales were $473 million, according to Business Week. Besides, the more powerful word-processing programs are driving up sales of laser printers and desktop scanners by offering features to use of fonts, graphics and scanned images and text.
No one denies that professional-looking brochures, marketing literature, manuals and guidebooks will help almost any business in its marketing efforts. When a customer compares a customized, typeset brochure from one company to the photocopied boilerplate brochures of another company, the customer usually is convinced that the one with the customized, typeset brochure is more professional. If the costs to produce such a brochure are very low, the advantage to a small business can be tremendous.
Will desktop publishing foster a renaissance in the printed word and image?
Some believe that poorly designed results from desktop publishing will prove that publishing should be left to the experts who have design skills. However, the enthusiasm for it is infectious. Indeed, Apple is trying to convince the business world that desktop publishing on Apple computers gives you ”the power to be your best.”
CONSUMMATE SCANNERS STILL A SHADE AWAY
Desktop publishing sounds like it might become bigger than spreadsheets, but there is a big difference: Spreadsheets are easy to prepare from scratch, but most publishing operations require existing information.
How will we get all of our existing text and graphics into the appropriate computer? Creating text and graphics using computers and software is definitely the wave of the future, but people have invested time and effort in the data of the past.
You would think that if engineers can design an inexpensive machine that can read the bar code on a can of soup and turn the code into computer data, they ought to be able to design a machine that can read ordinary text and do the same thing.
Such a machine has been designed and is used by large publishers and the government: The optical character recognition (OCR) scanner.
Unfortunately the technology of character recognition has not caught up with the technology of typesetting, and desktop scanners only have high accuracy rates with typewritten text or text printed in standard dot matrix and the Courier font on a laser printer, according to Rolando Esteverena, president of Datacopy, a scanner manufacturer.
Scanners can sense up to 64 shades of gray in an image, but personal computers are not well-equipped to handle the immense file storage space required to save these images in digital form.
Software still is in development, and some released (the new version of PageMaker), that can handle images with many shades of gray simulating a photographic halftone. Scanner manufacturers such as Datacopy (Mountain View, Calif.), Dest (Milpitas, Calif.), Microtek (Gardena, Calif.), Hewlett-Packard Corp. (Cupertino, Calif.) and Thunderware (Orinda, Calif.) offer painting programs with their scanners so you can improve a scanned image.
Laser printers cannot reproduce an image with the same quality as a halftone, so most desktop publishers are using page makeup for everything else and leaving a black-filled box on the page where a halftone will be dropped in before sending the publication to the printing press.
The cost savings are still tremendous, even if you use a graphics service for the halftones.
Text scanning is the next major area to be focused on by such companies as International Business Machines Corp., Xerox Corp., Apple Computer Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Corp.
But can we ever expect to get the paperwork out of the office?
Larry Tesler, vice president of advanced technology at Apple and a former Xerox research scientist, said that when Xerox developed the first laser printer in 1975, the research center produced a million new pages with it.
Paper never will disappear from the office because people still want to read from paper. However, textual information is transferred from one user to another in electronic form and already is stored on nonvolatile digital media. The next step is to provide pictures with the text and transfer and store entire pages in electronic form. This step will be made by the business world as soon as scanners are developed that ”understand” typeset text and personal computers acquire inexpensive mass storage devices to contain electronic pictures.
