What is DTP?
Desktop publishing started in 1985, with the conjunction
of Aldus Pagemaker (later acquired by Adobe), the Apple Macintosh, and
the $7000 Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to use Adobe Systems' PostScript page
description language, including its scalable fonts in Type 1 format.
The phrase desktop publishing is attributed to Paul
Brainerd, the founder of Aldus Corporation, as a marketing term that referred to
the use of a computer on top of a desk for publishing and also alluded the desktop
metaphor that Apple used to mimic a real desktop.
In 1986 Ventura Publisher was introduced on the PC moving
infant DTP into the mainstream, this allowed DTP to be moved into the home market via
GST's Timeworks Publisher on the PC and Atari ST but these systems were initially used
mainly for small-distribution publications such as club newsletters.
While this allowed many more people access to publishing
their own work it also gave DTP a bad reputation for a while as amateurs made
typographical mistakes that professional typesetters would never make.
As these systems improved they became widely adopted
throughout the professional publishing world, the turning point was the introduction of
Quark XPress 3.0 in the 1990s -- presently, virtually all publishing is "desktop
publishing". The superior flexibility and speed of desktop publishing systems has
greatly reduced the lead time for magazine publication and allowed more elaborate layouts
than would otherwise have been possible.
Programmable, automated systems like LaTeX mean that
long, repetitive, or highly-structured documents can be produced in a fraction of the time
that it would take a manually-controlled system.
Computer based typesetting using a personal computer
started in 1978, when the TeX program showed that publication-quality typesetting could be
done on any normal business computer, and even long and complex jobs like books and
journals could be produced from a standard desktop terminal.
Prior to this, typesetting had been performed by
mechanical (Lintotype and Monotype) or electro-mechanical means (photofilmsetting), or by
extremely expensive mainframe or mini-computer based systems.
Introduction of Apple Macintosh & PageMaker
The introduction of the Apple Macintosh and PageMaker allowed synchronous
typographical editing using the graphical user interface, this system was commonly
referred to as What You See is What You Get, WYSIWYG.
The Apple Macintosh, with historically superior graphics
capabilities (particularly in the areas of typography and colour management), and a simple
GUI, is highly popular in this application domain and remains one of Apple's core markets.
The Atari TT030 was widely used for DTP with Calamus
application. Calamus has its own technology called Softripping for WYSIWYG which uses the
same routine for output to monitor as well as high density print devices.
Technical writers often use content management systems and version control systems to manage
their work.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free
Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Desktop
Publishing.
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