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.

The Desktop Publishing Industry

What is Desktop Publishing?
The term desktop publishing, often referred to as DTP, is the purpose of using desktop system example a computer to originate, create, manipulate and publish complete documents containing text and graphics usually to an outputting device like a digital printer, film outputting or direct to plate process.

The desktop publishing industry is mainly associated with Graphic Designers, Advertising Agencies, Newspapers and print publishing houses who produce media in the form of magazines, newspapers, brochures, point of sale, large format displays etc,.

Before the invention of desktop publishing in the mid 1980’s the tasks involved in desktop publishing were done manually, by a variety of people and involved both graphic design and prepress skills this all changed with the introduction of the Apple Mac computer and page layout software like Aldus PageMaker (now Adobe PageMaker) which was one of the first page layout programs used and its founder Paul Brainerd of the Aldus Corporation, is also credited for inventing the phrase, desktop publishing.



The Apple Classic
The Apple Macintosh debuted in 1984, giving birth to desktop publishing by allowing users to create their own newsletters or printed material, the first Apple Mac to be used in the desktop industry was the Classic which had only a Maximum RAM of: 4 MB. It was small and very slow compared to today’s standards but at the time was a major development.      


Apple’s LaserWriter

With Apple struggling to find its place in the commercial computer market and while competing against IBM & Microsoft it was never going to be able to dislodge them from the business market. Finally Apple found its market in the desktop publishing world with the development of its GUI (Graphical user interface) and the LaserWriter, Apple's laser printer in conjunction with postscript language the user could pick from scores of typefaces, adjust character size as needed and switch to italic or bold or shadow at the press of a key, also postscript was used to decode this type to different output devices.                                                                 

Apple continued to develop faster more user friendly computers for the desktop industry like The Power Mac, The G4 and The I Mac and today’s models The G5, Mac Mini & Mac Pro. These computers became the industry standard in the desktop publish world and this industry today is mainly Mac based. The PC never really made it in the industry due to various problems with outputting to high end print devices.

Now let’s look at desktop publishing software applications, there have been many thought the years like WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, Ventura Publisher and Corel Draw, which were mainly PC based but with the introduction of Adobe into the desktop market and its range of page layout programs they have become industry standard. The software used today in most publishing houses is Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, & Adobe Acrobat.

Quark Express is another long established page layout program
but with Adobe family of programs Quark Xpress is slowly been
pushed out of the market. Adobe products are well suited for this
industry as they are all made from the one manufacture, each
program in the suite are connected, each capable of creating
PDF files, they are also tested to output to all high end devices
used in the print industry.

Not alone can the computer and the software application produce a final product for mass distribution in the desktop industry there are many more devices need in electronic publishing as we see in the next section.

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