Publishers seek desktop insight at Seybold

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 1992 by Len Egol

Desktop publishing, while no longer a new technology, is still changing fast. To grapple with its more troubling issues - like color management - thousands of computer-publishing executives and suppliers descended on the Seybold Computer Publishing Seminar and its companion new-product expo, the Seybold Showcase, in Boston in February.

Although desktop color-management problems continue to plague the industry, help seems to be on the way. The Macintosh solution, according to Gerald Murch, director of Apple's imaging systems, is a color-management framework that would work on any system and with any application by providing software plugins that would match all color files.-Apple hopes to have its ambitious product ready by year's end.

Already here, and demonstrated at Seybold, is a device-independent color-management software from Electronics for Imaging Inc. of San Bruno, California, called EfiColor. The product has been licensed to original equipment manufacturers like Kodak, Xerox, Scitex and others as well.

Down on databases

It may be a popular topic, but database publishing isn't all that popular with people who are doing it. From the perspective of Gary Cosimini, senior art director of The New York Times, "Instead of speeding things up, databases slow you down in direct proportion to what you add to them." Speaking at one of the seminars, he called the present generation of monolithic databases "gorillas" that are quickly, take a long time to set up, bog down in use, and are never as portable as advertised.

He predicts that huge, centralized publishing databases eventually will be replaced by smart files dedicated to specific tasks that exist on the periphery of a networked file-server environment. They're the "guerrillas - instead of gorillas" of the publishing industry, he says.

Some Seybold speakers looked beyond traditional print publishing altogether. Adobe CEO John Warnock predicts that personal computers that really communicate, rather than just create documents, will be the wave of the future. Warnock, father of the PostScript page-description language, believes that computer-based electronic media will soon begin chipping away at the dominance of print in information sales.