The desktop revolution

UNESCO Courier, July, 1988 by Howard Brabyn

THE DESKTOP REVOLUTION

In 1473, explaining the somewhat slipshod appearance of his latest publication, a printer of Parma in northern Italy declared that because rivals were about to bring out the same text, he had had to rush it through the printing process "faster than you can cook asparagus".

This colourful hyperbole bears eloquent witness to the astonishingly rapid spread of publishing in the second half of the fifteenth century. Barely twenty-five years after Johannes Gutenberg had originated his new method of printing (using movable metal type, a press and an oil-based printing ink), printing had spread to nearly all the major trading centres of Europe. In the first half of the fifteenth century the number of manuscript books in Europe could be counted in tens of thousands; by the year 1500, more than 9 million books had been printed.

The history of printing and publishing, like that of all human progress, is a record of the interplay between technological innovation and social change. Whilst each of these two streams of human activity promotes the other, with each in turn playing the leading role, the really crucial leaps ahead have always been made when the two converge to become an irresistible tide. Thus, whilst it was made technically possible by Gutenberg's discoveries, the development of printing in Europe, "The German Art" as it was at first called, was equally a response to the spread of literacy and to the social climate of the Early Renaissance.

The early printers were men of many talents. Not only did they design and cast their own typefaces, they also fulfilled the functions of publisher, editor, printer and bookseller. Only bookbinding and the manufacture of paper were left to others. William Caxton, for example, the first English printer, was an accomplished linguist and himself translated from the French the first book to be published in English, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1475), which he printed on the press he had established in Bruges.

One of the great early printer-publishers was the Venetian Aldus Manutius (1449-1515). In 1490, Aldus began producing the first printed editions of many of the Greek and Latin classics. Later he pioneered the production of cheap pocket editions, with what for those days were large print runs of 1,000 copies to keep down the cost, and commissioned the first italic typeface (see page 12). In 1502, he published Dante's La Divina Commedia on which his famous imprint, the anchor and dolphin, appeared for the first time.

As the demand for books and publications of every sort grew, the days of the great printer-publishers were numbered. The only way the book-hungry market could be supplied was by specialization and the division of labour. As a consequence the world of publishing gradually took on a new form, which has lasted until modern times, with the functions of author, publisher, printer, bookbinder and bookseller becoming separated.

Significantly, however, the name of Aldus Manutius has become associated with the current revolution in the publishing world, for Paul Brainerd, the man who in 1985 coined the phrase "desktop publishing", is president of the Aldus Corporation, the firm that produced one of the first programs capable of composing and formatting text merged with graphics on a computer for subsequent output to the new generation of printing and typesetting machines.

What exactly is desktop publishing? Basically it is the application of personal computers to the entire range of the publishing process, from the typing in of the author's original copy to the final printing of the publication. It is a means of producing documents, complete with graphics, ranging from one-page information or advertising leaflets, through brochures and price lists, to newsletters, magazines and even books, on equipment which can comfortably be housed on a reasonably large desk.

The basic equipment, or "hardware", required consists of a computer, complete with a visual display unit (screen), a keyboard and a movement sensing device known as a mouse, an optical scanner and a laser printer. The programs, or "software", needed to operate the equipment consist of a "page description language" which translates the image on the computer screen into a set of digital instructions that the laser printer can follow, and a composition program to drive the entire system.

The advent of desktop publishing was as sudden as its social and economic implications were profound. As recently as 1970, the text sent by a publisher to a professional printer would be set in "hot metal" by methods not fundamentally different from those used by Gutenberg and Caxton some 500 years earlier. By 1985, typesetting to professional standards could be achieved in the office and in the home.

Five key technical advances made this possible: . the development of a new generation of very powerful personal computers; . the development of page description languages to drive laser printers and phototypesetters; . the development of small, comparatively cheap laser printers with a printing resolution (300 dots per inch) capable of producing output of "publishable" quality; . the development of composition languages to drive the whole desktop system which can easily be operated by users with very little knowledge of computers, typesetting or graphics; . the development of scanning devices which can "read" photographs, drawings and previously typed or printed texts and feed them into a computer where they can be modified as required and incorporated into the document to be produced.