The PC corner: desktop publishing is for economists

Business Economics, Jan, 1989 by Robert F. Wescott, Mary V. Yates

I normally do not have back-to-back guest columnists, but I am making an exception this quarter. At the recent NABE annual meeting in Pittsburgh, I saw a demonstration of desktop publishing that really opened my eyes to the potential of this approach for business economist. Back when Monsanto was putting out our quarterly Economic Intelligence Report, I can remember spending a solid week each quarter with our Graphic Arts people, proofing type-set copy and checking hand-done graphs. By the time we went to press, I was exhausted - both physically and mentally. Desktop publishing on a PC offers the potential to bypass this step completely - to go directly from text and graphics in your PC to a near-typeset quality newsletter that can be output on a laser printer.

The demonstration I witnessed in Pittsburgh was put on by Rob Wescott of Alphametrics Corporation. I offered Rob the opportunity to do a guest column for the PC Corner, and he accepted. Because of the potential of this approach for economist, I felt it important to feature it in this quarter's column.

One other item needs to be nentioned. I received several queried from annual meeting attendees on the availability of econometric software for the Apple Macintosh computer. I thought that it would be interesting in some future column to feature the Macintosh; however, my experience is solely with the IBM PC. Are there any guest columnists out there who would like to address this subject? If so, drop me a line in care of Ed Mennis, the editor of Business Economics, whose address is on the inside front cover.

IF YOUR DEPARTMENT publishes economic newsletters or reports, your production routine may go something like this:

You start with and armload of paper - articles produced with several different word processors and printers; graphs generated on a PC, sent to a pen plotter, and reduced on a photocopier; big tables crunched out from mainframe to a laser printer.

You now hand the pieces to a typesetter for rekeying and redrawing, with final output to come from a high-resolution phototypesetting machine. The result looks great in the end, but it may take days or weeks to get right, and it's expensive. Or may be you turn to an artist who will physically cut and paste the pieces into a "mechanical" for offset printing or photocopying. This process is cheaper than typesetting, and looks it - and it, too, may take days or weeks to get right.

Next cycle you start all over again, collecting the same armload of paper, paying the same bill, and trying to communicate the same wishes to the typesetter or artist (who has by now forgotten how you want it done).

HOW DESKTOP PUBLISHING CAN HELP

Desktop publishing can put you back in control. It can give you the professional-looking results of typesetting at a cost that's close to pasteup. The turnaround time will be shorter - perhaps hours instead of days or weeks. You can make extensive last-minute changes to both content and format. And the work can be done by people on your own staff, who understand what you want.

What is desktop publishing? A full-featured desktop publishing package - one like the two biggest sellers, Xerox' Ventura Publisher and Aldus' Pagemaker - is much more than a souped-up word processor. It is a PC-based typesetting and page layout tool, with the following advantages:

1. It lets you electronically merge, without retyping,

your armload of files - text files from

a variety of word-processing packages; graphic

files in both image ("raster" or "bit-mapped")

and line-art ("vector") format; ASCII files of

statistical matter or equations.

2. In a menu-driven, graphics-based environment,

you use a mouse to arrange the pieces

into a single "publication" or "chapter" file.

3. You can add graphic and typograohic enhancements

(logos, complex ruling lines and boxes,

shading, arrows, bullets, large first capitals).

4. You'll have a wide variety of typeface sizes and

styles at your command, and the spacing of

the type - the quality issue that most distinguishes

word processing from professional

typesetting - will be precisely controlled

(techniques such as "kerning" will condense

the text by about 10 percent over word-processed

text, saving you printing and postage

costs).

5. In a WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you

get") system, the screen will given an accurate

preview of what the printed page will look

like, down to type styles and sizes, appearance

of artwork, and placement of headers and footers.

(In our experience, none of the popular

system are really truly WYSIWYG - they

are 95 percent WYSIWYG. In certain cases,

printing your page on paper is the only way

to get the final proof.)

6. You can do drastic screen editing (adding a

paragraph, deleting a graph, updating numbers

in a table), and the publication will

reformat in seconds.

7. The finished product can be output either to

your office laser printer or to an off-site high-resolution

phototypesetter.

And what about next month? For publications following a standard format, Ventura offers a big bonus: simply write over your old input files with new files of the same names, and your new publication is virtually done.