A print shop on your desk

Nation's Business, March, 1986 by Karen Berney

A Print Shop On Your Desk

Rachel Farley-Crisp used to get frazzled and frustrated as her monthly deadlines approached. She writes, edits and designs Weyerhaeuser Company's semiannual 12-page newsletter, and, she says, "I found myself spending a great deal of time on paste-up and proofreading at the expense of reporting and writing."

Now, however, she never touches scissors and paste or galley proofs. Her new tools are a personal computer and laser printer that, in three days, turn the Weyerhaeuser Maintenance Journal into the kind of professional looking publication that used to require two weeks of "tedious back and forth to the typesetter," she says. As a result, "I am now working faster, smarter and more creatively. I am on the computer all the time. . . . I could never give it up!"

Farley-Crisp is one of a small but rapidly growing number of users of a new technology that goes by a variety of names including "desk-top," "in-house," and "personal" publishing. It enables the operator to compose publications ranging from one-page flyers to newsletters to full-length books, complete with illustrations, on the computer screen exactly as they will look on the printout.

In computing circles, this is known as WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get")--pronounced whizzywig.

Electronic publishing, though not new, has only recently become affordable for smaller operations. High volume publishers such as aerospace companies and government agencies have been making sizable investments in it for years. In the largest printing contract ever let by Uncle Sam, the Department of the Army recently awarded Electronic Data Systems Corporation, Dallas, $62 million to link as many as 200 Army facilities in the United States and abroad in a network that will enable electronic entry of technical and training manuals. When up and running, these sites will transmit complete pages to commercial print shops expected to put out 26 million pages daily.

Typical of the kind of configuration the Army might use is a work station connected to a high speed laser printer and a high resolution scanner for photography and artwork. Such a system sells for about $80,000 and can easily exceed $200,000 if a few more work stations are attached.

Today, people like Rachel Farley-Crisp are becoming self-publishers for as little as $10,000 to cover the cost of a personal computer, software and a printer. At that low price, desk-top publishing will burst into nearly every office that produces documents in volume, says Arlene Karsh, director of computer publishing services for C.A. Pesko Associates, Inc., a Marshfield, Mass., consulting firm.

This is a drastic change from just two years ago when sales of desk-top systems accounted for a tiny percentage of the $700 million electronic publishing market, says Karsh. This year desk-top publishing vendors will command 17 percent of a $1.4 billion market and by 1990, sales will top $1.2 billion and account for 26.5 percent of a projected $4.25 billion business, estimates Karsh.

So far-reaching could be the impact of desk-top publishing that many are hailing it as the next Lotus 1-2-3, the popular spreadsheet software that made personal computers the mainstay of corporate financial departments. "This is a landmark technology that is going to change the way the nation thinks and works," claims Terry Ulick, editor of the new magazine, Personal Publishing. "One people who work with words get a whiff of its advantages, they are going to be crying out for their own systems much as numbers people screamed for Lotus," he asserts.

"I am not predicting that DTP will be an overnight success liek Lotus, but it certainly has the potential to be," says Paul Brainerd, who coined the term DTP (for desk-top publishing) and founded Aldus Corporation, Seattle. Aldus

created software that enables DTP systems to combine text and graphics on the screen. He adds: "There are at least as many writers as financial analysts in the corporate world."

If acceptance of Aldus' product is any indication, DTP is going to be very big indeed. Since Aldus started shipping its $495 PageMaker program last July, the firm has grown from 8 to 40 employees, installed several thousand units and seen purchase orders increase 40 percent each month.

Three development shave made DTP attractive: lower costs for computing power (the personal computer can do much that used to require a minicomputer), a low-cost laser for printers (laser printers can now cost less than $5,000) and software that can translate a computer page to the printer.

Now, scanners selling for under $2,000 are hitting the market. With these, desk-top publishers will be able to store large numbers of documents on computer disks without retyping them and to keep a library of frequently used drawings on hand.

Technology alone, albeit impressive, could not sell DTP. What got Weyerhaeuser to sign off on DTP was the bottom line, emphasizes Farley-Crisp. "The investment was very easy to justify, because we figured the payback period would be less than a year," she says. Meanwhile, what sold her on going electronic was the fact that she mastered the equipment in half an hour.