Desktop Publishing

In the 1980s printers came with a resolution of 300 dots per inch (dpi) and handled 8.5 by 11 inch paper; and color printers were not available. In the mid-2000s printers in the price range of $4,500 and up come with minimally 600 and as high as 4,800 dpi—well above the most exacting commercial requirements. They also handle commercial-size sheets of up to 13 by 19 inches. And, of course, they print in full color. Printers in these categories are widely available, moreover, from producers like Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Ricoh, and others.

For an investment of around $25,000, a small business can install a genuinely state-of-the-art DTP system. The investment may be justified if the company is selling typesetting services—or such services are a necessary element of a larger business, e.g., manual preparation or publishing. Costs are significantly lower than in pre-DTP days; back in the early 1980s a single high-end printer could run $20,000. Nevertheless, the investment is substantial. It is also worth-while noting that DTP, in today's market, still excludes important elements of "finishing" printed products: this involves trimming, folding, sewing, stapling, binding, and packaging the brochure, book, magazine, manual, or whatever. High-end DTP is therefore no less a commercial decision today for the small business than before micros came with fancy layout software. To be sure, much less cost is involved in a workable DTP system capable of putting out attractive color brochures occasionally.

INTERNAL SKILL SETS

The broad expansion of small computers since the 1970s has been accompanied by a steady drumbeat emphasizing ease of use. In actual fact the industry has leapfrogged ahead in a competitive frenzy to gain or maintain market share and has not delivered on ease and rational perfection of its products.

This is the view taken by William R. Howard, writing in PC Magazine. Howard wrote: "Bah, humbug. My feelings of good will toward the technology provider portion of humankind took a dive during the holiday season. My computer just didn't perform many of the tasks that it should have done easily. In the realm of technology, even people who think they're smart can be brought to their knees." In documenting his tale of woe, Howard also touched on DTP. He wrote: "For my wife, I produced a photo book of our summer vacation '¦ The finished product was spectacular. The process was a horror show: Tiny on-screen work area, equally small page preview, limited page layouts that were too small to let you read the text, fixed photo aspect ratios, 38-character caption limits for vertical photos, no spell-checker. I spent close to 10 hours creating 30 pages; half that time was wasted dealing with the clumsy interface."

Almost no one actually engaged in DTP would disagree with Howard. Practiced at the professional level, DTP requires substantial skills acquired over a longer period of time. Skill sets rapidly age unless the art is continuously practiced. A business that only rarely uses DTP faces re-learning cycles each time—for a loss of efficiency. Sending the job out may be more cost-effective.

Professional level DTP requires the same know-how that the typesetters and page-designers of old also possessed. The difference is that operations that once required cutting, measuring, and pasting are done today by mouse. The software packages dutifully import from the past measurement system and terminology—which must be learned. The great complexity involved in handling a document that may be on several overlaid "layers" (for colors, for pictures, for text of various kinds) mean mastery of sometimes baffling, uninformative, and unintuitive menu systems. Their meanings have to worked out gradually by trial and error. Manuals provided by the software producer rarely cover matters well, are rarely up-to-date, and, these days, may not come on paper. Operators are often required to buy and to use simultaneously several third-party references to solve a single problem.

These points are made in the cause of clarity—not to imply that DTP does not have quite superb values for the enterprise that makes an effort to master and use it. DTP is truly excellent tooling—especially for those who come to DTP already skilled in the underlying arts of photo-composition, layout, and typesetting. Thus it enhances existing skill sets—but imposes training burdens on the small business anticipating ease of use. Therefore a commitment to this type of production, for these reasons, must be a deliberate and commercial decision reached, ideally, after thoughtful testing of alternatives.

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