Desktop publishing: changing the way you work

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1989 by Alex Brown

Desktop publishing: Changing the way you work

Desktop publishing (DTP) implies that a single person can write, draw, design, edit, typeset, paste up and print his work without using any professional supliers. Emotionally, the idea of self-publishing appeals to many people. On a practical level, publishers note that the idea promises savings, direct supervision, and reduced reliance on outside vendors. In both cases, the real issue is control. Control is so desirable that it entices creative and commercial people alike; yet both must accept the new tasks and new relationships that it brings.

DTP places the originators of print projects closer to production, with the purest kind of authority over their work. It makes editors into typesetters, art directors into color separators, and secretaries into production managers.

Sometimes this vertical enhancement of capabilities is unwelcome or undesirable: Not every writer is pleased with the extra work he or she will have to do, even if it offers a bigger stake in the story's appearance; and not every editor should be making typographic decisions. Above all, an interest in graphic presentation should make people appreciate the work of graphic professionals, not force them to take it upon themselves.

In any event, it's no longer a question of whether you'll use DTP tools, it's a question of when. If you wait a while, you'll probably be using a more powerful computer and more refined page make-up software than the equivalent items available today. While you're waiting, some serious problems, many of them bound up with fonts and character sets, may be solved. (We need a few new keytops, along with attendant changes in character displays, to give us ballot boxes, em dashes and true quote marks, among other things.) Soon, you will have to ask yourself very hard questions about why you're waiting, since your hesitation may cost you and your staff the opportunity to learn and grow with this new technology.

This might overstate the inevitability of DTP in your professional life, but it's difficult to imagine a productive publisher clinging to conventional typesetting and page production. DTP might have to grow a bit to overtake the version of composition and paste-up you use now, but it's evident that a collision course is set between traditional, high-end composition and DTP. Since it will eventually be impossible to reject the technology, when will it be possible to embrace the procedures it brings?

This article will discuss the major changes that editorial, art and production staffs will face when using a desktop publishing system. It presumes some understanding of computer terms and DTP procedures in order to tackle the topic on a somewhat advanced level. If DTP is very new to you, study the subject further before plunging into a discussion as specific as this one. But do return to this point because implementing a DTP system requires clear thought about the way people go about their work with these new tools.

Changes in editorial tasks

Editors, frankly, are the ones all the graphic arts professionals are really worried about. Editors were about to have Palatino and Century Old Style a mouse click away, and they were certain to manifest that deadly combination of high graphic interest and low graphic competence. Giving editors control over stories would result in dreadful design, yet editors would never give up their new control. It would become politically or emotionally difficult to determine who had, or deserved, authority over the appearance of text. And the beautiful, blank, page make-up screen would lure any novice with the promise that he'd become a great designer by being able to try out so many alternative arrangements of type.

That blank screen is just as blank as a piece of paper. It's simpler to fill it with type, and easier to judge graphic treatments on it, but many people finally learned that only half the design process is reacting to what you've drawn. The other half is initiating it.

In short, if editors represent a threat to designers, it may be a short-term menace at best. Nevertheless, a DTP system brings the deep psychological attraction of total control to anyone's desktop. If you fail to acknowledge how the people in your company will react to this significant enticement, you've ignored a dynamic change in your work place. Few people are insensitive to the matter of controlling the final appearance of their work.

Let's get an overview of some of the new responsibilities DTP brings to a magazine staff. Throughout its progress toward a final, typeset page, the story can remain accessible to editors, authors and art directors. The text is written and edited in electronic form, using a word processing program. Once it's composed, the proofreader checks galleys or loosely formatted pages. With DTP, he may be the only reader examining the typeset text for bad breaks and loose lines. Previously, a professional type shop did this and made corrections before releasing first galleys. In fact, the proofreader probably thinks that page make-up programs are pretty lightweight affairs if they yield such poor results. What he doesn't realize is that traditional typesetting systems are prone to the same lapses but are used by people whose job is compensating for them.