Who has good DTP advice? 'Printers do,' says one

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, August, 1989 by James E. Strothman

Who has good DTP advice? 'Printers do,' says one

Chicago--How can printers hold onto magazine customers when desktop publishing technology is advancing so swiftly? "Help guide clients through the maze of hype that's been put out," says Alan J. Darling, general manager, QuadGraphics, Inc., Pewaukee, Wisconsin, whose customers include such prestigious names as Architectural Digest and the three major newsweeklies. One piece of advice he gives clients is: "Desktop publishing is dangerous when you use it for production."

In a keynote address at the recent Corporate Electronic Publishing Systems (CEPS) conference, Darling explained that DTP, "by definition, is one person sitting at a desktop doing everything"--writing articles, doing illustrations, designing page layouts, making corrections and printing out the final document.

Magazine production, he maintains, is a work-group process with supervisors typically assigning the writing, editing and artwork to a number of different people. QuadGraphics prefers to take a hand in shaping the mechanics of the process, where it can, to best fit their needs for printing, says Darling.

"We sit down with clients and work out the configurations they need--how many terminals, what terminals, how many file servers, what networking. We also integrate the hardware and software," Darling says.

Controlling type compatibility is especially challenging with DTP systems, he says. For example, "If you laid down Helvetica from different manufacturers, you'd see quite noticeable differences." Also, Monotype's typefaces are slightly smaller than those of Linotype, another major type supplier.

Printers should advise clients in areas such as press limitations in reproducing photographs, Darling says. For example, professional photographers regularly shoot pictures in a six f/stop exposure range between the deepest shadows showing detail and the lightest highlights, he says. However, presses can only print a four-stop range, "which means somewhere along the line you lose quality."

The solution, Darling points out, is to control photography better using lighting setups to limit the range between shadows and highlights to four f/stops before the image is shot. (See "Taking control over color," FOLIO:, December 1987, page 20). The transparency may not be as beautiful, he concedes, "but you know what you have on the transparency can be transferred right through to the press."