7. What You See Is What You Get

Jon Seybold had, by 1985, published widely on the potential ground-breaking possibilities raised by the convergence of PostScript, Linotype, and Apple's Macintosh and LaserWriter. He too was surprised at the apparent market failure following The Macintosh Office launch, but he realised that the missing ingredient was a software application that would make full use of the Mac's GUI abilities.

Paul Brainerd was known to Seybold from his time working at Atex, a company in Massachusetts responsible for computerising many stages of newspaper production [1]; with former Atex col­leagues he had in 1984 formed the Aldus Corporation and begun work on a PC-based, publishing-solutions software programme called PageMaker. 

A hitherto inexistent concept, PageMaker was part word processor, part graphics manipulator, allowing the user to arrange both text and graphics on-screen in page-layout format. Potentially, by incorporating PageMaker into The Macintosh Office workflow, one could, for the first time, design a complete page on-screen using multiple selections of type and fonts and, with a laser printer, produce an exact rendition of this layout at near-typeset quality. This electronic process promised to replace the standard practice of mechanically splicing and pasting text, headlines, and images on to a 'paste-up' board prior to photographing. Having witnessed first-hand the programme's performance, Seybold urged Bainerd to meet with Apple and, ultimately, to switch his end-user focus from PC to Mac. 

In July 1985 PageMaker was released as an application for the Macintosh, the Apple-Aldus partnership was formed, and desktop publishing as a concept was born [2,3]. 'WYSIWYG' (What You See is What You Get) is a term used ever since to describe this fundamental attribute of desktop publishing, and it inspired the subsequent development of many such applications to be used primarily in conjunction with the Apple Macintosh and LaserWriter. 

In 1987, Adobe released its Illustrator software, which included a 'Pen' tool allowing the user to draw Bézier curves on-screen, then scale drawn objects into myriad shapes and sizes [4,5]. While this won the instant approval and acceptance of the design communities, it encouraged healthy competition in the form of CorelDraw and FreeHand, Aldus' accompanying application to PageMaker. 

In the same year, the Colorado-based Quark company released its QuarkXPress page-layout software that, importantly, included colour-manipulation components and was considered by its users to be comparatively stable. Within three years, by version 3.0, it had become the designer's programme of choice. 

Adobe's next product, PhotoShop, released in 1989, was again designed for the graphic arts market, and it would prove to be even more popular than Illustrator [6]. While Illustrator is based on PostScripted Bézier curves, allowing designers to draw line art from scratch, PhotoShop enables the manipulation of raster pixels: images taken from other sources, such as scanned artwork [7]. As the processing power of computers increased, PhotoShop became capable of producing output equivalent to that of high-performance workstations [8], and, in conjunction with QuarkXPress and the Macintosh, it became (and remains) the de facto publishing design tool. 

When Adobe acquired Aldus in 1994, PageMaker, which had lost almost all its share of the professional market to Quark, was redeveloped and, in 1999, was successfully rebranded as InDesign, an instantly popular competitor that, due to a superior library of Adobe digital fonts and a more user-friendly front end, soon usurped Quark's stronghold and confirmed Adobe's domi­nance of the desktop-publishing applications market.

Aldus PageMaker

 

Notes

  1. Atex, a Kodak subsidiary, was a leading supplier of phototypesetting and page-layout technology to the US newspaper industry and, in 1986, equipped News International's aforementioned, controversial new Wapping print works (Oatridge N., 2003. Wapping '86: the strike that broke Britain's newspaper unions. Coldtype Magazine, p.6).

  2. Pfiffner P., 2003. Inside the publishing revolution: the Adobe story. San Jose: Adobe Press, p.54

  3. The term 'desktop publishing' was allegedly coined by Brainerd himself, when asked to describe his company's new product ; however it is also credited to Jonathan W. Seybold in reference to a character from popular television programme, The Flip Wilson Show. 

  4. Pfiffner P., 2003. Inside the publishing revolution: the Adobe story. San Jose: Adobe Press, p.83

  5. In 1989 Adobe released a Windows version of Illustrator for Microsoft, followed in 1990 by applications for UNIX, NeXT, and Sun SPARC workstations (Pfiffner, 2003, p. 87). 

  6. PhotoShop, created by Thomas and John Knoll, was in fact licensed in 1989 by Adobe as a companion programme to Illustrator. 

  7. Pfiffner, 2003, p.83

  8. Pfiffner, 2003, p.125

 
 

Tom O’Reilly worked in the Academic Books Production department of Cambridge University Press, 2007–2014.

This blog comprises excerpts from his book What You See Is What You Get: Desktop Publishing And The Production Revolution at Cambridge University Press (1980–1996).

 
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