Desktop Publishing

Historical Context of Communication Technologies

The social and technological significance of DTP can be best seen by placing it in historical context as an innovation in communication technology.

Many historians and anthropologists consider the emergence of writing to be an absolutely necessary condition for the legal, commercial, and religious systems that characterize "civilized" societies. Although writing had appeared by 2,000 B.C.E., few important innovations occurred for the next 3,500 years. This was the period of "scribal transmission," when texts were "published" by laboriously copying them by hand. A key advancement during these centuries was the development of phonemic (alphabetic) writing systems that were far easier to learn and use than previous word-based systems or syllabic systems. Other innovations included the development of paper and the codex book (rather than scroll), cursive script, and the development of social organizations to manage copying (such as the "scriptorium" of western medieval Europe). Despite these innovations, by the end of the Middle Ages books were still extremely rare and expensive to produce, publishing remained a sophisticated specialist practice, and writing and reading were rather rare abilities.

The dramatic emergence of printing press technology in late fifteenth-century Europe made it possible to reproduce texts far more easily, and with greater fidelity, than was possible with scribal transmission. The consequences of this invention radically affected all aspects of our social, political, religious, and cultural lives. Printing is now recognized by historians as perhaps the single most influential technological event for western civilization.

A Walk Through Mid-Twentieth Century Printing

Contemporary life involves an immersion in printed material: newspapers, magazines, textbooks, scientific journals, instruction manuals, technical documentation, charts, tables, contracts, receipts, business proposals, catalogs, junk mail, brochures, flyers, product packaging, and so on. But the production of the visually pleasing pages that support this flow of information has until very recently been an expensive and time-consuming process, requiring specialized expertise of many kinds and very costly equipment.

The steam operated presses and "hot type" of the nineteenth century gave way to phototypesetting and computer composition by the mid-twentieth century. However, the publishing process of the 1970s and early 1980s was still an extremely complicated and expensive process.

Consider for example a relatively simple book with black and white line art. Designers prepared written specifications for typography and layout. These were delivered to editors who, perhaps after several revision cycles, used them to "mark up" typewritten or word-processed manuscripts. The marked up copy then went to a "composition house" where computer compositors entered, usually by hand, texts and formatting commands into computer files in order to implement the instructions expressed in the markup.

Next, in a separate step, these files were "batch" processed by composition software to create data files in the specific language used by a particular phototypesetting machine. Samples of the phototypesetting (imaged on film) were sent back to the compositor and editor for approval. Note that with no previewing capability, this was the first opportunity the compositor had to see the actual visual effects of the formatting codes.

When samples finally appeared correct to the compositors, they were sent back to the editor who verified that they met the original design specifications. Several iterations might be involved, and given the nature of the process, even the purely mechanical part of the iteration could take as long as twenty-four hours, especially if either composition or typesetting were outsourced to another company, which was quite a normal procedure. Moreover, if several computers were involved (e.g., the copyeditor's computer, the composition computer, and the typesetting computer), removable media such as eight-track tapes had to be prepared and delivered physically.

Once the samples seemed to be correct, a complete set of "galleys" (un-paginated formatted text) were produced, along with sets of captions, page numbers, running titles, and other features needed to make up the printed page. All of these, along with needed artwork, were sent to "paste-up" specialists who used razor tools, paste, and hot wax to physically compose each individual page on special "paste-up boards" by cutting the galleys of type into columns and pages, adding the artwork (prepared separately), and adding the individual running titles, page numbers, captions, etc. Indexes, in-text references to pages or numbered figures, variable running titles, and other page-based apparatus could not be constructed until pagination was known, so they could only now be composed by the compositors and processed by the layout artists. The completed paste-up boards (called "mechanicals") were then stacked and transported to the printer. From these boards were created printing plates.

Corrections or changes required time-consuming repetitions of this process, and, in particular, any changes that resulted in a change in pagination were enormously expensive. The final product could not be easily revised, updated, or repackaged for other uses or for other delivery formats, whether analog (anthologies, abridgements, new editions) or digital (CD-ROMS, databases, e-books, web pages).

While it is true that systems were eventually developed that allowed text to be composed into pages interactively and previewed in a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) environment by the compositor, these were expensive, typically could not accommodate artwork, and in any case were not widely used, even by the early 1980s.

The Emergence of Desktop Publishing

In the mid-1980s, a revolution occurred which radically changed the publishing process. This change was the result of two things, each itself a combination of recently developed hardware and software:

• WYSIWYG page layout software running on a personal computer;
• a high resolution all-points-addressable matrix printer with high-function page description software.

The revolutionary personal computer was the Apple Macintosh. The page layout software was PageMaker, released by Aldus Publishing. The printer was the Apple Laserwriter, and the page description software was called Postscript, by Adobe. The marketing of these components in 1985 marked the commercial debut of desktop publishing.

Problems with Desktop Publishing

This new, widely accessible, generally affordable technology for mass producing typeset-quality pages, complete with graphics, offered many improvements over previous technologies. However DTP also brought with it some problems.

Quality Concerns.

The low cost of equipment and the ease with which software could be learned seemed to suggest that anyone who could acquire and operate the tools could create and produce typeset-quality pages. The graphics specialists who knew how to design pleasing pages were rapidly replaced in many organizations by clerical workers or by professionals in other disciplines whose chief qualification for desktop publishing was their expertise in operating an office computer. Because it was assumed that DTP software could be implemented with little or no training, organizations eliminated whole departments and discarded traditional processes of design and production.

Without a framework of policies and procedures to oversee the use of DTP tools, the result was very frequently a loss not only of visual quality (the "ransom note" effect one gets from ugly combinations of fonts and bad composition practices), but also—and much more importantly—a loss of accuracy and effectiveness of the printed materials. Ironically, many organizations discovered that the money-saving potential of DTP tools actually led to an overall loss of efficiency, as tasks that had once been done by professional designers became time-consuming additions to the workload of people with other primary responsibilities.

Information Management Concerns.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s another major revolution in publishing was underway. The "descriptive markup" approach organized digital documents into structures of logical components (such as chapters, sections, titles, paragraphs, lists, block quotations, and other similar items), and then separately associated formatting rules with each type of component. This approach turned out to have many advantages over directly inserting formatting codes into the document, making it easier to create documents, globally alter formatting, support information retrieval, print on a variety of output devices, convert to different file formats, or customize output for a variety of purposes. Documents created this way could be flexibly repurposed for different products and delivery systems. This way of managing a document as a database is based on fundamental principles of information management.

The creators of desktop publishing systems rarely reflected these insights, however, preferring instead to focus on the intuitive ease-of-use and composition capabilities of the software. As a result, early DTP products were generally far less versatile and functional than they might have been. It was hard to import data easily from other more structured formats. Even more significantly, it was difficult to use content that had been processed by DTP systems for anything other than the original intended printed products: DTP files could not be easily repurposed for delivery on CD-ROMs (compact discs-read only memory) or the web, for instance, or accessed by information retrieval tools, or imported into databases, or integrated with emerging networked information systems.

Today these problems are being addressed. In particular, the descriptive markup approach to creating and managing content is increasingly integrated with DTP tools and practices, due in part, perhaps, to the recent near-universal acceptance of XML as the standard language for describing publishing content. It is now recognized that the production of effective high-quality publications requires carefully thought-out processes and compliance with fundamental principles of information management. There is no substitute for expertise and carefully defined systems. And there is no substitution for principles and best practices.

Desktop publishing is now common in business, government, and education. It continues to be based on the same basic components found in the original configuration of 1985: high-resolution all-points-addressable matrix printers, personal computers, interactive page-layout and graphics software, and page description printing software—each easy-to-use, powerful, and relatively inexpensive. The challenge now is to integrate desktop publishing into the wider process of creating, managing, and delivering information in the networked world.

SEE ALSO DOCUMENT PROCESSING; INTEGRATED SOFTWARE; MARKUP LANGUAGES; TECHNOLOGY OF DESKTOP PUBLISHING.

Allen Renear

Internet Resources

About Desktop Publishing for All Platforms. <http://desktoppub.about.com/>

"The Ultimate Electronic Publishing Resource." desktopPublishing.com. <http://desktoppublishing.com/open.html>