Desktop Publishing:
Introduction:
This paper is organized into
three parts. One is a general discussion of desktop publishing: two, a more
specific discussion and history of desktop publishing; and three, a rather
detailed overview of Idesign.
Using computer software,
desktop publishers format and combine text, numerical
data, photographs, charts, and other visual graphic elements to produce
publication-ready material. Depending on the nature of a particular project,
desktop publishers may write and edit text, create graphics to accompany text,
convert photographs and drawings into digital images and then manipulate those
images, design page layouts, create proposals, develop presentations and
advertising campaigns, typeset and do color separation, and translate
electronic information onto film or other traditional forms. Materials produced
by desktop publishers include books, business cards, calendars, magazines,
newsletters and newspapers, packaging, slides, and tickets. As companies have
brought the production of marketing, promotional, and other kinds of materials
in-house, they increasingly have employed people who can produce such
materials.
Desktop publishers use a
keyboard to enter and select formatting properties, such as the size and style
of type, column width, and spacing, and store them in the computer, which then
displays and arranges columns of type on a video display terminal or computer
monitor. An entire newspaper, catalog, or book page, complete with artwork and
graphics, can be created on the screen exactly as it will appear in print.
Operators transmit the pages for production either into film and then into
printing plates, or directly into plates.
Desktop publishing is a
rapidly changing field that encompasses a number of different kinds of jobs.
Personal computers enable desktop publishers to perform publishing tasks that
would otherwise require complicated equipment and human effort. Advances in
computer software and printing technology continue to change and enhance
desktop-publishing work. Instead of receiving simple typed text from customers,
desktop publishers get the material over the Internet or on a computer disk.
Other innovations in the occupation include digital color page-makeup systems,
electronic page-layout systems, and off-press color-proofing systems. In
addition, because most materials today often are published on the Internet,
desktop publishers may need to know electronic-publishing technologies, such as
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and may be responsible for converting text
and graphics to an Internet-ready format.
Typesetting and page layout
have been affected by the technological changes shaping desktop publishing.
Increasingly, desktop publishers are using computers to do much of the
typesetting and page-layout work formerly done by prepress workers, posing new
challenges for the printing industry. The old “hot type”
method of text composition—which used molten lead to create individual letters,
paragraphs, and full pages of text—is nearly extinct. Today, composition
work is done primarily with computers. Improvements in desktop-publishing
software also allow customers to do much more of their own typesetting.
Desktop publishers use
scanners to capture photographs, images, or art as digital data that can be either
incorporated directly into electronic page layouts or further manipulated with
the use of computer software. The desktop publisher then can correct mistakes
or compensate for deficiencies in the original color print or transparency.
Digital files are used to produce printing plates. Like photographers and
multimedia artists and animators, desktop publishers also can create special
effects or other visual images, using film, video, computers, or other
electronic media. (Separate statements on photographers and on artists and related workers appear elsewhere in the Handbook.)
Depending on the
establishment employing these workers, desktop publishers also may be referred
to as publications specialists, electronic publishers, DTP operators,
desktop-publishing editors, electronic prepress technicians,
electronic-publishing specialists, image designers, typographers, compositors,
layout artists, and web publications designers.
Desktop publishingFrom Wikipedia
Desktop publishing, or DTP, is the process of editing and
layout of printed material intended for publication, such as books, magazines,
and brochures, using a personal computer. Desktop publishing software, such as QuarkXPress,
Adobe InDesign
or the free Scribus,
is specifically designed for such tasks. Such programs do not generally replace
word processors and graphics applications, but are used to aggregate content
created in these programs: text, raster graphics (such as images
edited with Adobe
Photoshop) and vector
graphics (such as drawings/illustrations made with Adobe Illustrator, or CorelDRAW).
For publication, DTP software can output PostScript or Adobe
PDFs which can be used by commercial
printers to produce printing plates.
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 Aldus Corporation founder Paul
Brainerd, who sought a marketing term that referred to the use of a computer on
top of a desk for publishing and also alluded to 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. 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.
Desktop publishing software also spread to
lower-priced (8-bit) home computers, such as the Apple II. The 8-bit computers
lacked the processing power and memory capacity to challenge the more powerful
16-bit platforms (Mac/PC/ST) and their more upscale publishing software. As if
to acknowledge this disparity, 8-bit packages were collectively labelled Home
Publisher or Personal Publisher
software, with a market emphasis on non-professional, casual use. Among
elementary school classrooms, the rudimentary Newsroom by Springboard Software was a popular journalism tool.
As the PC and Mac based publishing systems
improved, they attracted the attention of the professional publishing world. The turning
point was the introduction of Quark XPress 3.0 in the
1990s—currently, 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.
Windows based typesetting using a personal
computer started in 1990, 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 (Linotype and Monotype) or electro-mechanical means (photofilmsetting), or by extremely expensive mainframe or mini-computer based systems. 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 color
management), and a simple GUI, is highly popular in this
application domain and remains one of Apple's core markets.
An Overview
of Adobe InDesign 2.0
InDesign 2.0 delivers easy-to-use tools that reduce elaborate
design tasks to a few quick steps. It also offers tight integration with other
Adobe graphics applications, and built-in support for publishing pages—in
print, on the Web, to Adobe PDF as eBooks, and more.
Capture
your inspiration ---Add flair and
sophistication to your design pages with the innovative creative features in InDesign 2.0. Produce
superb typography. You have a
choice of composition engines to help you determine the visual “color”of your text. The single-line composer considers one line at a time, while the paragraph composer compares and
adjusts multiple lines at once, producing superior typography. In addition,
robust hyphenation and justification controls enhance the appearance of type. With
optical margin alignment, you
can control whether punctuation and edges of letters “hang” outside margins,
thus making the edges of a text block appear more even. To achieve precise
spacing between type characters, you can choose among four kerning options,
including optical kerning,
which lets InDesign determine smooth spacing for
adjacent characters, even for lines of type with mixed fonts and sizes. InDesign supports the advanced layout capabilities of OpenType fonts, including swashes,
discretionary ligatures, and other features that previously required switching
to a different font. In addition, InDesign offers
easy access to the alternate glyphs common in OpenType
fonts.
Apply
editable transparency settings Apply editable drop shadows, feathering, and other transparency settings to text,
graphics, and images in a few quick steps. InDesign
gives service providers and printers the control they need to reliably output
transparency effects. For example, spot colors with drop shadows remain spot
colors, rather than
converting to process colors during output. Only transparent
areas are flattened for output. Create and import tables In one step, you can convert tab-delimited
text into an InDesign table from sources including
Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and database applications.You
can also directly import styled Word and Excel tables. After you import or
create a table in InDesign, you can format a table by
changing row height and column width, applying alternating stripes of color,
and merging or splitting cells.You can even use
high-end typographic controls and inline graphics in tables.Add graphical flair
Need tocreate
a quick design element for your publication? Use the pen tool or pencil tooltodrawnew
paths or to edit the paths from images you’ve inserted into your document. Use
the scissors tool to cut paths
apart.
Combine multiple paths into compound paths to create unusual
shapes with transparent areas. Convert text to paths to create frames you can
fill with images, graphics, or other text. Add flair to your pages by
formatting text along any path in
InDesign. Create a 3D appearance and apply special effects,
such as ribbon or gravity. Thread the text on a path to other text frames and
paths. You control precisely how text aligns on a path.Using
slider indicators,manipulate
start and end points for the text. Flipping the text is easy—simply move the center bar on the path to the opposite side of the
path.
“Nest” text and graphics
frames. Use any object—including basic or hand-drawn shapes and converted
text—as a frame, and then paste other frames into it to produce eye-catching
design elements in a few quick steps.
Give your shapes depth and
dimension, or create whimsical text treatments by applying gradient strokes and fills to the
shapes. Specify linear or radial gradients, and then use the gradient tool to
adjust the angle of the linear gradient or the center point of a radial gradient.
Be
the master of deadlines
InDesign is packed with features to help you stay one step
ahead of your deadlines without compromising
your creativity.
Manage
long documents
Group multiple documents
into a book list to number
pages sequentially. Generate tables of
contents, cross-
references, and indexes. Save time, because InDesign can easily preflight and package, print, or export
to
Adobe PDF
all of the documents in a book list. InDesign preserves cross-references,
table of contents
entries, and index entries as hyperlinks in a PDF file.
Use
powerful production tools
Set up multiple master pages for any document,each containing a
specific combination of headers,footers,
page numbers, frames, and other elements you want to use
repeatedly. In addition, you can base one
master page on another, creating an ongoing relationship
between them. Editing the “parent”master page causes
changes to ripple through all the “child” master pages.
In InDesign,
you can undo and redo any number of steps. This
flexible support lets you experiment freely,
moving backward and forward through your previous
formatting changes.
To manage your design
elements efficiently, set up document-wide layers, which work like one or more
transparent overlays. Each layer can contain elements such as
text, images, and drawn objects. Hide, lock,
and reorder layers with ease to achieve the effect you
want.
Quickly apply formatting
attributes using the eyedropper tool,
and designate which specific formatting
options you want the tool to copy.
Navigate
quickly
Preview
how a page will print by clicking a
button that instantly hides all nonprinting items, such as grids,
guides, and frame edges.
It’s easy to keep an eye on
how changes you’re making to one part of a page affect another part of that
page
by setting up multiple
views of the same document. For example, you can open two views of a
page, one
zoomed in at 3,000 percent and the other set at 100
percent.
You can instantly zoom out
to a five-percent view, or zoom in to a 4,000-percent view. And you can fine-
tune the view setting using the lower left corner of the InDesign window,the Navigator palette,or shortcut
keystrokes.
Print
reliably and precisely
A streamlined new printing
interface offers preflight and packaging controls, robust high-end print
production, and printer styles for job automation. Just as you create character
and paragraph styles toformat text,you can create Print and PDF styles to ensure that
the same settings are used when appropriate,thus
saving time and ensuring consistent output.
Move
beyond print Publish your documents to multiple channels including print,
the Web, handheld/wireless devices, and
more.
Create
media-independent content
InDesign can build XML-based structure into new and legacy
documents, making it more efficient and
cost-effective to publish content to multiple channels. The
cross-media toolset is designed to be easy and
approachable. InDesign also
delivers a framework that’s both scriptable and extensible to system
integrators and third-party developers who will create XML-based
systems with it.
Use the Structure view and
Tag palette to create XML. Repurpose legacy documents, build templates to autoflow XML content, and browse through a document’s hierarchy. Import well-formed XML documents into the
Structure view, and then drag content onto frames to lay out your pages. To
speed design work,
map XML tags to paragraph styles.Manage cross-media workflows
InDesign 2.0 supports the Web Distributed Authoring and
Versioning (WebDAV) protocol, which means
that you can use the Internet or an intranet to
collaborate on InDesign files. For example, you can collab-orate and work securely in Adobe Studio, an online
resource with rich content and services. InDesign
also offers built-in support for Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP). Metadata
tags travel with
the document and describe its content. By embedding them
in your InDesign documents, you make the
documents easier to track, manage, and retrieve.
Deliver
rich content
Export to XML, SVG (scalable
vector graphics), and tagged Adobe PDF (eBook) format
from InDesign
documents. With InDesign, you
control key settings for image compression, font embedding, and color
conversion. Choose whether to save to Acrobat 4 or Acrobat 5
format.
Export well-formed XML files
for use as dynamic content sources in Adobe GoLive.
Combine them with GoLive templates to quickly
generate Web pages.
Work
efficiently through Adobe integration
Take advantage of tighter
integration with Adobe InDesign, Illustrator,
Photoshop,
and Acrobat.
Get
up to speed quickly InDesign
2.0 is built to look and feel like Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. In
addition, InDesign offers extensive support for
importing and exporting PDF files. Familiar
Adobe commands, tools, palettes, and keyboard shortcuts make your knowledge
transferable among Adobe products. Tailor InDesign
to your style using customizable keyboard shortcuts. If you’re transferring from QuarkXPress or Adobe PageMaker, you can open QuarkXPress 3.3–4.1 and
PageMaker 6.5x–7.0 documents directly in InDesign.