When was desktop publishing introduced

While this era saw innovation in design tools, traditional artists and printers were still part of the media landscape. Arguably, this led to an initial decline in quality: without the ability to control kerning, letter-spacing, or font selection, the printed outputs from programs like Type Processor One or PageMaker were primitive, at best. With each improvement in screen displays, processing memory, and style sheets, desktop publishing became a disruptive threat to traditional layout design.

The swift evolution of WYSIWYG editors demonstrates the necessity of taking upstarts seriously—but of course, that's easier to see in hindsight! Around the year , the big names in desktop publishing— InDesign , Scribus, OpenOffice, Publisher , and Pages—rolled out their products.

These are still major players in the professional market. The quality of the output increased dramatically in this time period. As personal computers evolved to their now-familiar form, designers could control the digital page to look like the printed page. In the second decade of the new millennium, desktop publishing underwent another seismic shift.

Rather than only license-based options, layout design software began a transition to the cloud. Many print magazines and newspapers ceased publication, either shutting down or becoming web-only. As internet connections became faster, browsers more reliable, and memory capacity increased, creators and consumers expected to be able to do more, to do it more quickly, and to do it better.

As email became dominated by web platforms, word processing went to the browser for example, with Google Docs , and tablets and smartphones introduced an explosion of apps, desktop publishing went to the cloud, as well. Lucidpress is one of those sleek, cloud-based desktop publishing tools. With an easy-to-understand interface, auto-saving and web publishing, and deep integration with the applications that are a part of modern business workflows Google Docs, Dropbox, and even Facebook , it's bringing layout design out of the sphere of specialists.

You no longer need an advanced degree to create high-quality print and digital publications—nor do you have to break the bank on your design software suite. It won't be long until the notion of your layout design being tied to a single "desktop" will be as quaint as the idea of a monk cloistered away with his vellum, or a magazine made with actual glue. More designers use laptops, tablets, and cloud-based products than ever before.

This space is opening up to the public. Since the software-as-a-service SaaS landscape is changing so quickly, it's worth re-evaluating your business's needs.

What documents do you need to design to connect with your customers? How many resources are you willing to expend on desktop publishing software? Do you need the ability to share and collaborate with your team?

Are you creating brochures , letterheads , flyers , reports or eBooks to be distributed? I would set and output and graphics from my super fast Mac IIci with PageMaker RageMaker or Illustrator 88 to a Linotype L imagesetter on RC paper and paste-up wax everything up to a board, which would be shot in our camera department to a negative. We also had a second L with film. We would output a lot of spot color film negatives that were stripped into conventional film by strippers.

I later went to two prepress companies that were heavily invested in Scitex and Hell equipment Primax, Prisma, Assembler, magnetic tapes, Dolev , , Hell drum scanners and struggling with the same paradigm changes with DTP.

That is, when lead type was replaced by type set in photographic film. I happened to work in a newspaper that used a photosetting system that could be used as well to fit information in layouts set by commands similar to those of Latex or HTML. It was mad by ATEX company and it lasted about ten years until we moved, very slowly to the desktop revolution with Win 3.

Those pages were then photosetted as individual offset plates for the newspaper and positioned in the roll web. I remember the first keyboards we used were about cm. Gustavo: it is really enthusiastic to listen and to learn from old stories. Very engaging and one of the shortest introduction to modern Prepress history events, I have ever read. Every graphic design student needs it. The system incorporated HP mg Hard Drives for each workstation.

CIPC was before the Pixet. Imager and Imager II with the trackball and zoom wheel and dynamic keypad. Those stations rocked. Imager 3 with adjustable slant digitizing tablet, build in viewing box. AMPEX disc drives as big as washing machines. R series even more prehistoric. I started in printing in with lead composition, went into camera, conventional color separation and stripping.

Loved swapping out Barco monitors and huge disk drives. We upgraded to 3 Prismaxes and 2 Prismas and went from tape to optical disks. In we went to MAC s and dropped Scitex. That was a great trip down memory lane. Neat library page. I forgot all about aldus which was a blast from the past. I once had a pre-press manager who used to curse computers and rave about the simplicity of lead plates.

Alot of innovation in the last century so thanks for the trip. Your email address will not be published. Skip to content These pages give an overview of the history of prepress from onwards. The eighties: desktop publishing takes over In the early 80s many of the technologies that are still in use today first appear on the market.

My Daughter gets a kick out of that…. Best replacement for Kenex? It is perfect for the history component. Please advise, thx. Graphic Arts Systems: R. Burbank, CA from to I found the history of a prepress firm. Gives the development, till date. Dear Laurens, If I may add a bit to your history of prepress.. That laste more or less until or so around here Madrid, Spain. Database publishing has further reduced the time required to develop thick manuals and catalog publications.

Desktop publishing helped condition a generation of personal computer users to be on the lookout for "the next big thing. Many cinema length movies are now edited on Apple Final Cut Pro on a desktop computer, replacing equipment and software that would have cost a hundred thousand dollars in the s. Comparisons with word processing While desktop publishing software still provides extensive features necessary for print publishing, modern word processors now have publishing capabilities beyond those of many older DTP applications, blurring the line between word processing and desktop publishing.

In the early days of graphical user interfaces, DTP software was in a class of its own when compared to the fairly spartan word processing applications of the time. Programs such as WordPerfect and WordStar were still mainly text-based and offered little in the way of page layout, other than perhaps margins and line spacing.

On the other hand, word processing software was necessary for features like indexing and spell checking, features that are today taken for granted. As computers and operating systems have become more powerful, vendors have sought to provide users with a single application platform that can meet all needs.

Software such as Microsoft Word offers advanced layouts and linking between documents, and DTP applications have added in common word processor features. Comparisons with other electronic layout In modern usage, DTP is not generally said to include tools such as TeX or troff, though both can easily be used on a modern desktop system and are standard with many Unix-like operating systems and readily available for other systems.