Talking text

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1990 by Liz Horton

New York City-There are times-and the give-and-take between editor and freelancer may be one-when nothing matches the human voice. Nuance, emphasis, all can be lost in typed notes. Never mind the difficulty of pointing out the right spot to revise: "Why not expand paragraph six on page three and move to page 12 after the third line..."

But what if you could tag a precise point in a story with a vocal comment? That's the promise, for magazine staffs at least, of voice annotation for electronic documents.

The NEXT Computer System, for example, has a built-in digital sound processor that allows FrameMaker 2.0, publishing software from Frame Technology, to incorporate sound into a document as an icon. You ca merge your note into the text, then click a mouse on the icon, and the voice note plays back.

Group editing, possible with Mainstay's MarkUp for the Macintosh, was demonstrated in a voice version last fall. The program uses a concept called layering," through which a freelancer's article, say, can go simultaneously to many people on a network. Editors can add comments on-screen via proofreader's marks, pop-up notes, circles-or, in the demonstrated version, voice, using a digital signal processor from Discussion Systems.

Voice annotation won't catch on immediately, says Kristen Vais, FrameMaker's product manager. It still makes sense to attach a yellow sticky to the page; it catches your eye." But as voice, text, numbers, graphics, animation and video go digital, the "artificial barriers" that separate them are removed, says Dave LaDuke, publishing markets manager at NEXT. Multimedia training programs and presentations are hot applications now, and are pushing the technology that allows talking documents. In sum, voice annotation is "a richer means of communicating ideas, and that's what DTP really is," says LaDuke. "It's not just word processing."-L. Horton