Yacht Vacations; one step at a time is the way this magazine set up its microcomputer production system and began reaping significant savings of time and money

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1988 by Antonia Thomas, Bob Rogers

Yacht Vacations Yacht Vacations is a glossy, four-color consumer publication focusing on yacht charter vacations. It is distributed worldwide. For the past two years, our editorial pages, and a great number of our advertising pages, have been produced using only Macintosh computers, a laser printer and a modem link to an imagesetter 1,000 miles away.

Our desktop publishing adventure started in April 1985 with the receipt of a "beta" (engineering testing) copy of PageMaker software from Aldus Corporation. (Bob Rogers, Yacht Vacations' publisher, had been involved with the microcomputer industry for nearly a decade, and Aldus felt the magazine would be an ideal test vehicle for the software.) Along with two diskettes, we received a rather thin sheaf of photocopied pages that would later evolve into the PageMaker user's manual. The software from the Seattle-based company was designed to run on the 512K Apple Macintosh--with which Yacht Vacations' editorial staff was already equipped.

Despite its bugs, and the problem of there being no real operator's manual, that early version of PageMaker quickly showed us that we could save substantial time and money producing our magazine. Our typesetting costs, for example, have dropped nearly two-thirds since we moved to our desktop publishing system. Production time savings have allowed us to go from three full-time art and production staffers to a lone art director; and from three full- and two half-time editorial staffers to one full-time and two less-than-half-time editors.

Prior to the arrival of PageMaker's beta release version, we followed the time-honored procedure of editing copy, passing it to the art director for type specifications, and sending it out for typesetting. Returned galleys would then be proofread and corrected--and sometimes sent back for additional corrections or last-minute changes. Even with final proofed galleys in hand, we would sometimes find last-minute changes forcing our art director to redesign a layout--meaning yet another pass at the typesetter. Paste-up was still to come, of course.

As we performed this frustrating juggling act, we also "played" with our beta release software, sending Aldus our reactions to the joys and problems encountered. More and more, we began taking our playing seriously, relying on trial and error for much of what we tried and accomplished.

By July 1985, we had begun experimenting in earnest, first with "flowing" copy from word processing files into columns, preset to our standards, on the Macintosh screen. Soon we were designing and producing full magazine pages with graphic elements and hair-line boxes to indicate key lines. We were sending proof after proof to the laser printer--at less than three cents each.

Counting the advantages

The ability to see a fully formatted page on the screen, make minor changes in seconds--or major changes in minutes--and see a new full-page printed proof immediately are several of the most exciting, cost-saving and powerful advantages of this system. We can accept or reject layout options without new typesetting or art board paste-up. If an article is a line or three too long, we can edit copy to fit, right on the page, seeing the results as we go. If copy comes up short, the layout can be easily revised: A hairline box for a photo can be enlarged with a touch, for example, or a callout can be copied directly from the text and instantly sized to fit the extra space.

Typefaces, style and point sizes can be changed with two or three touches to the mouse, with results immediately displayed on the screen and output on the laser printer. Type is always straight and column guides consistent. Pages can be numbered automatically, and folios, department heads and other constants inserted just once--on "master" pages. Mechanical tasks that had taken hours and even days to accomplish--much less adjust--are now done in minutes.

Originally, we intended to purchase our own Linotronic imagesetting machine to produce full camera-ready pages on standard resin coated paper or film. At the time, it was the only machine capable of high-resolution output directly from the Macintosh and PageMaker system. While awaiting delivery, we published our first wholly PageMaker-produced pages in the magazine (a black-and-white article with a cost comparison chart set in a box with a 20 percent drop screen) plus several pages of our International Chartering Directory. For these early pages, we had Photo Mechanical Transfers (PMTs) shot of the laser printer output--not the best quality, but we are unaware of anyone having noticed the difference.

We were ready to commit ourselves to desktop publishing, but the imagesetter still hadn't arrived. Then we learned about typeLINE, a Teaneck, New Jersey, typesetter that takes Macintosh files by telephone modem by midday and returns completed pages by courier service the next morning. Because we were a little nervous the first time we used the modem, we sent a diskette by courier service as a back-up--something we haven't done since.