Desktop Publishing

Desktop Publishing had been a catchword during the Eigthies for a triade out of Apple Macintosh as computer platform, Adobe PostScript as page description language and Aldus PageMaker as typesetting and layout application. The term WYSIWIG – What You See Is What You Get – was meant as description for an interactive control of the page elements. During times of photo typesetting there always had been an indirect control using mnemotechnical code only. An optical control has been served after that e.g. in an indirect manner. But now it was possible to edit anything directly. Of couse, in the first days not everything went well, and so some experts mucked about a “What you get is what you should have expected”.

In 1987, Linotype opened their exposure devices Linotronic 300 and 500 at imprinta fair at Düsseldorf. By doing this, they definitely cut the development path of their phototypesetting systems. This was one of the milestones pushing the Mac what was taking advantage of PostScript technology, onto a breakthrough in the graphics arts industry.

The German term “Text-Bild-Integration” (Integration of text and pictures), what was used during the photo typesetting era before, now really came into life. But it has to be said that the stability and safety of production as well as typesetting quality has not been reached by early DTP solutions.

DTP had got its chance because of the integrated open architecture and the better solution of integrating text, graphics and pictures. The revolution went its way, and soon the vendors of phototypesetting systems didn’t find any customers anymore. In the field of high-end color workstations, there has been a longer time a place for proprierity solutions, until the increasing speed of the Macs and the application Photoshop ended up this era too.