Desktop Publishing Hits (1987)
Desktop Publishing Hits (1987)
Mar 30, 2012
This is the third of eleven observations I shared during my part in the conversation about Pen-to-Publication (see blog entry for 24 February 2012).
I’d been happily using my Macintosh for 3 years, when the technology advanced enough to enable me to set type and create entire layouts completely on-screen. I have become self-sufficient up to the point of delivering paper “mechanicals” to an offset lithographic printer who will use mechanical presses to transform them into all manner of print publications.
Typesetters and typographers are appalled and angry. Also depressed. They say this crude phenomenon called desktop publishing will kill the centuries-old craft of typesetting. Dire warnings ensue—the quality of print media will suffer irrevocably because there will be such a glut of badly-produced, amateurish, and, not to put too fine a point on it, trashy publications.
One imagines similar warning cries being shouted when scrolls were displaced by codexes, when hand wrought manuscripts were displaced by printed books, when letterpress printing was displaced by offset lithography, when offset lithography was displaced by digital printing, and now, similarly as printed books are being displaced by eBooks.
This is not a new story.