Impact of Computers on the Printing Industry

Traditionally, completed text and graphics were sent to a printer to be typeset and composed into finished pages for printing. The finished pages, called galleys, were proofread and corrected. The galleys were then cut and pasted onto boards to be photographed. The galleys included blanks for any graphics which were added when the final pages were assembled. The corrected text and graphics were then ready to be photographed. This process applied to small pamphlets as well as books and newspapers (Gabriel, 1989, pp. 115-16).

In the early 1970's, Xerox developed the Alto, a prototype computer workstation that could edit and format text and produce illustrations. This was the beginning of what came to be known as desktop publishing. The major breakthrough in desktop publishing came with the release of the Macintosh computer by Apple in 1984. With the appropriate software and a laser printer, the

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cifically written for that manufacturer's computer hardware, and that software will run only on those machines. These systems can be very expensive: "In the early 1980's a medium-sized newspaper could expect to spend more than $2 million on a front-end System" (Cole, 1991, pp. 57-58). The trend in newspapers is toward less expensive technology, using as much pre-existing hardware and software as possible. So far, off-the-shelf systems do not have the capacity to service the larger newspapers. A metropolitan daily paper may need to build as many as 200 pages in a 12-hour period (Cole, 1991, p. 58). But a smaller paper like Le Droit in Ottawa, Canada, installed an off-the shelf system for half the cost of its old proprietary system. With the new system, the paper is completely electronically composed; before, much of the composition had been done by hand. Le Droit reduced its staff by half, laying off mostly composition room workers, but managed to prevent the closure of the paper, which had been imminent (Hundertmark, 1991, p. 60). In electronic publishing, both the software and the printer must use the same page-description language for a document to be reproduced properly. A page-description language is a formula that
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Adobe's PostScript, , Docu Tech, Le Droit, System Cole, Ottawa Canada, Gabriel Michael, April Extra, Publisher Xerox, electronic publishing, January Future, desktop publishing, roney 1991, text graphics, page-description language, computer systems, publish 6 pp, 6 pp, publish 6, le droit, gabriel 1989, 1991 april extra, roney 1991 46, april extra extra, language industry standard,
Approximate Word count = 1552
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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