The Desktop Revolution

Press, 30 September 1986, Page 18

The Desktop Revolution

NEILL BIRSS

Desktop Publishing Revolution, with three exclamation marks, the computer magazines are shrieking. Something momentous is happening in office automation, but it is just the prelude to revolution. Cheap offset printing in the last two decades brought page make-up into the hands of the amateurs: students with Bull gum and surgical scalpels making up varsity rags; and little offset machines in garages for the man editing and publishing his pigeon club magazine. The laser printer, close

in technology to the photo-copier, but with the drum carrying material put there by a computer, has now brought typesetting into the hands of the amateurs and the users.

The laser printer makes letters with a density of 300 dots an inch, less than a third the density of typesetting. But for perhaps two-thirds of printing applications, the difference is unimportant. In America some magazines and even a few small newspapers use laser printers for creating their pages. Driving the lasers are microcomputers of continually increasing power, with continually better software, and with continually higher resolution (fineness) in their displays. Apple led with the Macintosh. It usee a mouse, a device that enables the user to manipulate a pointer on the screen without using the keyboard (the name is from the two buttons which make the device look like the animal). The software quickly became available to take advantage of the computer. Several packages allow make-up on the Macintosh, but the best is Pagemaker, by Aldus. This allows the user to create columns on the screen, move and change the size of pictures, and to put box panels around headings. The laser printers it feeds the information to come equipped with fonts (families of types), and others can be added. Still more can be downloaded from the computer. Other firms supply disk loads to illustrations which can be incorporated in the pages. The IBM PC, the main business micro, was not left completely in the dust. But the main IBM page make-up software has been slower, less powerful, and much more expensive than the Apple Pagemaker. That’s why the release of Pagemaker this month for the IBM PC AT and compatibles is petrol on the flames of the Desktop Publishing Revolution. It greatly increases the number of potential users. The new release is more powerful than the Macintosh’s. New features include kerning, which is the adjustment of space between letters, automatic hyphenation based on a 90,000-word dictionary, and interactive page editing, so that the computer user can make up facing pages together. If anyone reading this is thinking of setting up the beginnings of a Murdoch empire with the kids’ Commodore 64; whoa! Here is what is needed:

• An IBM AT, or at a pinch an IBM XT with an accelerator card. A hard disk must be the storage medium. • A Hercules mono-

chrome card or an EGA (high resolution) colour card and special monitor. • A good laser printer (Laserjet Plus or Apple Laserwriter). • The software, which will be the best part of $2OOO all up (it runs under Windows). The potential Murdoch is looking at $20,000 or so, and you can still get reasonable typesetting gear for that money. But for the firm with an AT or XT already in the office for accounting purposes, and perhaps already eyeing a laser printer for elegantly printed letters, the outlay is not so much. Desktop publishing is sometimes known as corporate publishing. This is the immediate field or growth. Firms churn out skiploads of paper and manuals that they can now easily prepare for themselves. Without doubt the bot-tom-end of the typesetting industry is about to be run down as the early cars ran down the buggy-whip industry. But it will be a year or perhaps three before the resoluton of laser printers is good enough to replace typesetting in books and other fine work. Commercial page make-up will go first. Already, those lucky enough to own a Macintosh and Pagemaker can prepare work on screen, print out copies on the Apple Laserwriter, and then

send disks to an Auckland typesetter equipped with Linotron machines. These turn the Pagemaker code into finished type — not laser print but properly typeset. You send away floppy diskettes and get back made-up pages ready for the printer’s camera. Next year, laser printers will be cheaper by a thousand or two dollars. The year after that they will be cheaper still and of better resolution. The AT computers which power the latest version of Pagemaker 18 months ago sold in Christchurch for close to $20,000 each. Today this morning, you can get one for under $12,000, or you can buy an Asian AT clone for under $7OOO. The computer world is right to be excited about laser. But it is cheering itself hoarse at the cur-tain-raiser. The main game is a year, or perhaps two, off. That will be the full second printing revolution. Page make-up in most word processors, and laser printers cheaper than today’s dot-matrix printers.

Moveable type and photocompositions will retreat to craft shops and the world’s Ferrymead parks. Every man will be his own printer. As keyboarding, once the preserve of the printer, is now done in millions of homes and offices, so will page make-up. From there most of the world’s printing will be done either on cheap offset machines or on the increasingly sophisticated photocopiers. The special desktoppublishing programmes will themselves go. Steven Jobs, one of the founders of Apple Computer, says that in two years most word-process-ing programs will have the features necessary for desktop publishing on laser printers. In 100 years Pagemaker will be a working display in museums showing families on Sunday afternoons one of the last stages in the five centuries of print information before knowledge left paper for videodisks and computer databases.