Introduction to my GRCP101 Final Project

For my Final Project for GRCP101 I have decided to research the area of Electronic Publishing.

There are many types of Electronic Publishing and methods of Publishing but I would like to focus my research on Desktop Publishing in the print industry and the inventions and developments of publishing within that industry.

I shall give a brief overview of Electronic Publishing in general but for the most I shall concern my findings to Desktop Publishing. The title of this Final Project is “From the Printing Press to the Electronic Press”.

REASON I Choose this field of Research?

Given that I have spent many years in this industry. I feel this would be a very strong topic for my research. I would also like to include the different career paths in this industry from Production Artists, Graphic Designers, Digital Operators and the death of some careers also example the Plate Maker. I feel my research will be very useful to anyone who is thinking of entering into the Print industry, either as a Graphic Designer, Production Artist or a Digital Operator. This will help people decide if this career path is right for them.

What is Electronic Publishing?

So what is Electronic Publishing? To fully understand what the term Electronic Publishing means, we must first look at the word publishing and its aspect. Publishing goes through 3 stages, publish, publisher, and finally publishing. Publish means to issue, for sale or distribution, to the public printed, reproduced textual or graphical material. In order to publish one needs a publisher. A publisher is simply a person or company who publishes books, periodicals, multimedia etc., and finally, publishing is the business or activity of a publisher.

By adding the word electronic in front, it does not change the meaning of publishing, but the publisher does it electronically and with no paper involved. There are some exceptions to this rule in Desktop Publishing where the publisher sends electronic files to a printing press for final output to paper for distribution. This same principle applies to Digital Printing, which will be explained in more detail in this research paper.

There are various forms of electronic publications, ranging from books, newspapers, magazines, websites, CD ROMs, DVD, ebooks, E-journals, digital libraries, manuals and Social Networking. With escalating paper and publishing costs, magazine publishers and the academic community is now turning to electronic publishing as a way to reduce cost. On the other hand, copyright issues are limiting the amount of articles that newspapers are putting forth electronically.

Case study

KEYSTROKES DIGITAL
Brunswick House, Brunswick Place,
Dublin 2. Rep of Ireland.
To fully understand the technical tools used by the publishing industry in today’s market, I have gathered some information by email from a well known publishing house called KEYSTROKES DIGITAL where I worked, who are based in Dublin, Ireland. Listed below are the technical aspects used today in Electronic Publishing in this printing company.


Scanning: 
The company have two high resolution scanning machines. One is a colour Linotronic Hell capable of scanning up to A3 size (Fig.4&5). The second is a Shapphire black and white scanner (Fig.6), which can scan up to A4 size. High Resolution scanning is very important in digital publishing to have high quality artwork or graphics placed in a document it needs to be digitized into a computer for output. There are two types of high res scanning flat bed and drum scanning.
 
 
Fig.4
Linotronic ‘Hell’ A3 Color Flat Bed Scanner
Fig.5
Linotronic ‘Hell’ A3 Color Flat Bed Scanner
Fig.6
‘Sapphire’ A4 Black and White Flat Bed Scanner











Digital Printing:
Digital printing is a new development in the publishing industry these machines can print from a computer to paper in colour for short runs of up to 8,000 copies. At present Litho printing is still used for large print runs but this will all change in the near future. The company uses two Digital printing machines, both Xerox. The models they have are DC12 and 3535 (fig.7). DC12 prints 12 colour copies a minute while the 3535 prints 35 colour copies a minute. Both machines print up to SRA A3 size prints on different paper stocks.




Fig.7
Digital Printer - Xerox 3535
Fig.8
Workflow Server


Novell Server:
A server is one of the most important aspects of desktop publishing, all work must be back up during the production process and when a job is complete, rather than working with files on the hard disk of a computer. All computers in the production department are networked to this server. This means there is only one copy of a file and when work is complete it is saved directly to the server rather than hard disk so the latest version of the file is always on the server. 

The company uses a PC Server Novell, the server is run by a number of PC computers using Windows NT operating system. The server is also used as a queuing system that controls the workflow to different outputting devices (fig.8).




Fig.9
Linotronic 530, Imagesetter

Film Output:
At present the company still use standard film output CTF which plates are then made from and used on their Litho printing presses, the company use a Linotronic 530 (fig.9) capable of outputting film to A2 size, the company are in the process of buying the latest invention of desktop publishing CTP Computer to Plate system.





Eamonn Murphy, Manager Keystrokes Digital

“I have been in the Desktop Publishing business for over 30 years and in the last 15 years there have been so many new developments in technology, that have made production a lot faster and cost effective, I believe digital printing is the future.”
[“Eamonn Murphy” – Manager Keystrokes [Interview by email]. by E.Fitzgerald  May 20th 2011]
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