Desktop Publishing Gets a Primer
There is probably no more complex computer undertaking than what has come to be known as desktop publishing.
You can spend as little as $100 for a simple page layout program containing a handful of type styles and sizes and run it on an old IBM PC or Apple II or Commodore 64 and print the results on a dot matrix printer. Chances are that you won’t want to publish the results very widely.
At the other end of the scale, you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, using a high-performance personal computer as the centerpiece of an expensive array of black and white and color scanners, huge disk storage devices and high-resolution image setters that create the final page of text and graphics ready for the press.
Somewhere in between lies a world in which professional results can be produced with microcomputers.
Apple Computer has led the way with its Macintosh family of equipment, including the latest generation of LaserWriter printers that yield near-professional quality pages.
Now Apple has published a thorough and inexpensive book, The Apple Guide to Desktop Publishing. In simple language and illustrated with a number of publishing examples, the guide explains what desktop publishing is and how it is done.
What makes desktop publishing more complicated than other computer applications is that there are more pieces to the puzzle. At a minimum, a published page needs text in type sizes and styles that make it visually interesting and convey the relative importance of various elements on the page.
But most publications need a lot more than that--pictures, drawings, logos, charts, graphs and color. Those elements must be created or copied by using a variety of hardware devices and software programs.
The Apple Guide to Desktop Publishing, available for $8 from Apple dealers, won’t turn you into an expert publisher. It is not a how-to book, but a primer on what can be done and what software and hardware is needed.
Particularly valuable are the nine profiles of publications that are made with desktop tools--all Macintosh-based, of course. In fact, Apple used Macintoshes to create the book.
Smart magazine, launched about a year ago, was created on a couple of Macintosh Plus machines and a Macintosh SE, which is at the low end of the scale.
NASA’s Ames Research Center, on the other hand, uses 650 Macintoshes, 500 other personal computers and dozens of Digital Equipment Corp. VAXes all linked together in more than 100 local area networks to produce about 500 publications yearly.
The Smart Yellow Pages, created by Richard Saul Wurman at his company, The Understanding Business, is produced on about 40 Macintoshes and associated equipment. Working for Pacific Bell, Wurman’s group turns out two directories a week for a total of 96 community directories in California and Nevada.
Lest you think that desktop publishing can only be done on a Mac, many software programs come in versions for IBM and compatible personal computers and some for Amiga and Atari machines, as well. Much of the hardware, including scanners, printers and image setters, can also be connected to other systems.
So even if you’re a die-hard MS-DOS user, the operating system that runs on IBM and compatible machines, you still might want to pick up the Apple book. It will show you what to look for in the PC world of desktop publishing.
On the opposite end of the computer printing scale from desktop publishing is the continuous production of reports, invoices, payroll checks and the like.
I recently tested Epson’s DFX-5000, a big, fast, quiet dot matrix printer aimed at just those kinds of tasks.
Epson has long been a pacesetter in the dot matrix field, but until I used the DFX-5000, I had thought of its products as personal printers to connect individually to personal computers.
The DFX-5000, with a suggested list price of $2,199, can be an individual printer. But its features make it more suitable to be connected to a local area network or a minicomputer.
It is a nine-pin dot matrix printer with a wide carriage that handles paper and forms up to 16 inches wide. A high-speed draft mode prints at 533 characters per second, with higher-quality modes available at speeds of 480, 400 and 80 characters per second.
In addition to speed and a very quiet sound level, the DFX-5000 can be loaded simultaneously with two kinds of continuous-form paper. Both feed from the bottom, one in front and the other in back, and the user selects which to use from a control panel on the front of the printer or with software commands.
A firm could easily use the printer to prepare both invoices and payroll checks interchangeably, for instance.
THE PRODUCTS
THE APPLE GUIDE:
The Apple Guide to Desktop Publishing, an $8 primer on a complex subject available at Apple dealerships.
EPSON DFX-5000:
Features: The high-speed printer has dual paper feed paths, draft speeds up to 533 characters a second, 55 dB sound level, parallel and serial connections with other options.
Requirements: Computer system--single-user, multi-user or networked.
Manufacturer: Epson America Inc., 23530 Hawthorne Blvd., Torrance, Calif. 90505. Phone: (800) 922-8911. Suggested retail price: $2,199.
