Getting it to the printer; the desktop publishing revolution continues.

• Author: Miller, Chuck

A revolution is happening in the printing industry, and the message to printers is clear: become part of the revolution, or your customers may be captured by someone else.

Getting a piece ready to be printed used to be a very labor-intensive process, involving several people doing a small piece of the preparation. The language these people used to describe the steps in the process had been around for many years, substantially unchanged since the advent of film-based offset printing in the 1940s.

Randy Roberts of Lincoln Printing in Fort Wayne describes how printing has been done the last half century: "Traditionally, a job was produced by setting type, done by a typewriter. Then the project was pasted up into camera-ready art by an artist, then color-separated and/or shot with a graphic-arts camera by a color house. Then, after a proof and customer approval, plates were made by a plate maker or color house. Then, finally the job arrived at the printer for final production and finishing."

With the dawning of computer technology, the language of printing has changed dramatically, and more changes are on the horizon. As an example, just look at the steps that Indianapolis printer Shepard Poorman reports it took to produce a recent newsletter:

"Stories were written using Microsoft Word 4.0A on a Macintosh IIcx system. All copy was then imported into PageMaker 4.2 for layout and design using all Adobe fonts. The color illustrations were produced in Aldus FreeHand 3.1. Photographs were separated traditionally on a DS-SG-757 Color Scanner and output as randoms for color proofing. Black-and-white department illustrations were drawn in pencil, scanned on a HP Scanjet Plus Flatbed Scanner as diffused TIFF images, and imported into the PageMaker document as camera-ready art. The PageMaker document was then separated and output on a Linotronic 330 and stripped together traditionally with the FreeHand illustrations and the scanned photographs to form a composite set of negatives."

The entry of computer technology into the print shop has totally changed how printers print. "The impact of desktop computing has changed forever the graphic-arts community," says Douglas Wissing, president of Western Sun Printing Co. in Bloomington.

Mike Fox of Shepard Poorman lists four specific technologies that have come together to change the printing world.

"One, the cost of microcomputer technology has been falling, relative to the graphics-processing capabilities of the system," he says. "Two, new breakthroughs in laser technology have drastically reduced the price of high-resolution printers and imagesetters capable of printing text in traditional and new typefaces."

Thirdly, special computer languages have been...