Basically, the explanation of what desktop publishing (DTP) is, is as simple as the name suggests. Using a desktop device – a personal computer, workstation or another, equipped with special publishing software, connected to a high resolution printer to design and produce quality print-ready or printed materials.
The first company to focus on the development of an integrated document preparation system, with a high quality printer integration – Xerox, announced its Xerox Star system in 1981, at the cost of about $75,000 ($198,000 today) for a basic system.
The marketing failure of the first DTP system was reported in the 3rd September 1984 issue of Financial Times: “When Xerox looked for a new way to market its revolutionary but commercially unsuccessful ‘Star’ workstation.., it settled on what it called a ‘document creation system’ — in other words, a desk-top publishing unit”. And that, as well, was the first mentioning of the term desktop publishing in English print.
In the same year, 1981, the personal computer entered the mass-market with the launch of the IBM Personal Computer, and 4 years later – the cornerstone of DTP was laid.
Specialised page layout software and laser printers hit the market at nearly the same time. The first laser printer intended for B2B market sales, the HP LaserJet, was released in 1984. The device – capable ot printing 8 pages per minute, at high quality, horizontally and vertically in a variety of character fonts and producing graphics – entered the market, priced around $3,500.
Followed by the first desktop publishing software, PageMaker, released in 1985 by Aldus, a company later bought by Adobe.
The revolutionary change allowing page layout design in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) format, replaced the design by code, and pushed the DTP industry ahead.
At the same day that Aldus announced PageMaker, Apple introduced its LaserWriter, at its shareholder meeting on January 23, 1985, as the world’s first network printer to use PostScript (a page description language created by Adobe Systems) available to the mass market, priced around $7,000 and empowering designers to create a complete page of text and graphics on a computer and then produce a quick professional hard copy without significant expense.
Digitalized techniques entered the print world in the 90s, followed by the first smartphone and online digital books and periodic publications. In the recent years, the transformation from traditional hard copy print to digital publishing is developing at high speed. Successful business practices incorporate both desktop and digital publishing resources, for example – corporate annual reports, instruction manuals and newsletters in electronic formats, combined with hard copy marketing materials.
EVS Translations offers a variety of multilingual desktop publishing and digital publishing services to meet the unique requirements of your project. ->Visit our website to learn on the supported software and file formats.
