The Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing articles from July 1995

The Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing archives from July 1995

Welcome to our electronic doorstep. (http://www.media.sbexpos.com)
July 17, 1995... Readers patiently waiting for us to have an online presence are now invited to visit our newly created Web page, the electronic doorstep to the people, products and services of Seybold Publications. To reach us, go to the following url...

Digital World '95: it's the point of view. (includes related articles about Worlds Inc products; hybrid fiber-coax architectures; interactive communications provided by utility companies; and MIT's helpful online music recommendations, or HOMR)
July 17, 1995... Unlike the Seybold publishing events, which serve as semiannual summaries of what the industry has achieved during the year and forecasts of where it is heading during the next few years, Digital World looks almost exclusively toward the future...

Workgroup color printers: making the choices. (includes related articles about color quality, with a sample)
July 17, 1995... Once relegated to niche graphic arts markets, color printers represent a group of technologies that are poised to explode into the world of office printing. Unlike the monochrome laser printers that swept through this market in the '80s, no...

Apple launches color LaserWriter 12 600 PS.(Product Announcement)
July 17, 1995... Apple has joined the fiercely competitive market for quality color printers with its Color LaserWriter 12/600 PS, a 600-dpi, three-page-per-minute, letter-size laser printer based on a Canon engine. It incorporates new technology aimed at...

Adobe bids to swallow Frame Technology. (Adobe Systems Inc)
July 17, 1995... In a surprise move to extend its reach into corporate publishing applications, Adobe announced on June 22 its intention to acquire Frame Technology. The purchase will be a stock swap: Each Frame shareholder will receive .52 shares of Adobe...

Chinon previews QuickTake competitor. (ES-3000 digital camera)(Product Announcement) (Product Announcement)
July 17, 1995... Chinon, a veteran supplier of inexpensive desktop peripherals, is the latest company to show an interest in the less-than-$1,000 digital camera market opened up by the Apple QuickTake. The company's ES-3000 Color Digital Camera received its...

Macromedia embeds Director in Netscape.
July 17, 1995... In a move that will bring multimedia to millions of World Wide Web readers, Netscape announced its plan to embed Macromedia's Director player software in Netscape's popular Web browser. The combination will enable Director-created video to be...

PageMaker 6: update is no Quark-killer.(Product Announcement)
July 17, 1995... The desktop page composition market is dominated by Quark Xpress and Adobe PageMaker, with Xpress winning favor among publishers, advertisers, designers and graphic artists, and PageMaker leading in the office and other general markets. The...

Bitstream, Codesco implement TrueDoc.
July 17, 1995... Sorry, service bureaus. All those fonts that you've bought over the years may just have been for naught. At the recent Nexpo newspaper equipment show, Bitstream demonstrated the first implementation of its TrueDoc technology, a font encryption...

World-wide power to market Xtensions. (XChange expands)
July 17, 1995... Distributing extension-based utilities has long been a one-man show with XChange as the star. Since 1991, it has aggressively marketed Quark Xtensions and signed up developers at an impressive pace. Now distributing hundreds of Xtensions, it...

Xerox XPrint printers look ideal for offices. (4915, 4920 and 4925)(Product Announcement)
July 17, 1995... As a follow-on to last year's introduction of the 4900 color laser printer, Xerox has introduced three new color laser printers aimed at the office market. The new XPrint series feature great versatility in how color printing is done, and a low...

Tektronic expands crop of desktop printers. (Phaser 480X)(Product Announcement)
July 17, 1995... Tektronix, which already had the broadest range of desktop color printers on the market, has introduced three more in its Phaser series, each using different technology. The Phaser 540 Plus laser unit and the Phaser 240 thermal-transfer printer...

Xante LaserPress targets plain-paper repro. (1800 model)(Product Announcement)
July 17, 1995... Plain-paper, monochrome laser printers continue to post gains in quality and performance -- to the point where they are challenging film-based imaging, especially for low-volume jobs produced at a local quick printer. The newest competitor in...

NewGen adds 1,800-dpi ledger unit from TEC. (ImagerPlus 18xf)(Product Announcement)
July 17, 1995... NewGen has become the first oem supplier to offer a tabloid printer based on the Tokyo Electric TEC A-659 printer, a 900-dpi engine it drives at 1,800x900 dpi. Calling it "the only 1,800-dpi laser printer designed around a true 900-dpi engine,"...

Zenographics updates SuperPrint for Win95. (SuperPrint Professional)(Product Announcement)
July 17, 1995... At PC Expo, Zenographics unveiled SuperPrint Professional, which bundles together new versions of each of its printing products: SuperQueue, SuperPrint and ZScript. The new bundle, which will be enhanced for Windows 95 and Windows nt, will also...

Nikon and Minolta duel in slide scanners. (SuperCoolscan and QuickScan 35)(Product Announcement) (Product Announcement)
July 17, 1995... Competition is heating up again in the market for inexpensive, easy-to-use slide scanners. Barneyscan (now part of PixelCraft) pioneered this segment of the scanner market, but Nikon's Coolscan, which is available in internal (drive bay) and...

Drupa spotlights desktop image-editing tools. (trade show)
July 17, 1995... Most of our coverage of the recent Drupa show is being carried in our sister journal, The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems. As we note on page 2, it spans quite a few pages. But the following items really belong in this Report. It has...

Update on digital video production.
July 17, 1995... In recent months we've continued to track the desktop digital video market, traveling first to the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas and then to Digital World in Los Angeles. The contrast between the two shows was...

Sprint drums up new business with network. (Drums)
July 17, 1995... Sprint is beta testing a new multimedia collaboration network, called Drums, designed for use in advertising, tv and film production agencies. We recently viewed the software, which has gone into about 30 sites for testing. Drums allows...

CommerceNet vs. CyberCash.
July 17, 1995... In last month's report on electronic money, we erroneously attributed the CyberCash system to CommerceNet. In reality, CommerceNet is a consortium of more than 20 companies working on the problems of electronic transactions. CyberCash is one...

Lotus accepts IBM's merger bid.(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... Lotus Development has accepted IBM's bid to buy the company for $64 per share, or $3.5 billion, making the largest merger in software history. As part of the agreement, Lotus retains its name and will become a separate subsidiary of IBM....

ATM progress. (ATM Forum approves Interim Interswitch Signaling Protocol)(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... Another obstacle to widespread adoption of atm was overcome last month. The ATM Forum approved an Interim Interswitch Signaling Protocol that will support rapid setup and teardown of circuits between switches from different manufacturers....

Ethernet keeps pace. (market)(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... Meanwhile, back at the Ethernet ranch, prices are also falling. In the 10Base-T arena, Asante cut the price of its repeater hubs and cards; an eight-port hub now costs as little as $200, while network adapter cards are down to the $60 level....

'Standard-definition' TV.(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... Hitachi will propose a standard-definition television (sdtv) spec to the FCC that would support multiple tv resolutions from a single digital stream, according to Electronic News. Coupled with a down-conversion system that Hitachi developed, it...

Toward ubiquitous MPEG.(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... It won't be long before mpeg video is a standard feature of every pc. Last month, chipmaker S3 and computer giant Compaq announced that Presario pcs would have S3's mpeg decoder chips on the motherboard. The chips will also be offered on...

Fast 256-megabit DRAM.(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... A team drawn from IBM, Siemens and Toshiba announced the development of a fast -- and eventually cheap -- 256-megabit dram chip. The device, made at IBM's Fishkill, NY, research center, offers an access time of 26 nanoseconds. It is also...

Securing software patents.(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... New guidelines have been proposed by the U.S. Patent Office that could make it easier to secure patent protection for software by allowing new software inventions to move forward through the examination process, even if they include abstract...

AOL buys Network Navigator (from O'Reilly)(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... America Online has acquired O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator World Wide Web site so it can offer an Internet-based service beginning on the planned launch date for Microsoft Network (MSN). Other recently announced AOL partners include PC...

Netscape to go public.(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... Netscape announced on June 23 its plans to go public this summer with an initial offering of 13.5 million shares. The transaction is being underwritten by Morgan Stanley. Prospectuses will be available in late July from Morgan Stanley in New...

MSN lines up content suppliers. (Microsoft Network)(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... Microsoft has announced that more than 100 firms are planning to provide content for the forthcoming Microsoft Network. Among the U.S. firms are Dun & Bradstreet, Cowles Business Media, Knight-Ridder, Curtis Publishing and Lexis-Nexis. The...

Scribble in the works. (authoring tool)(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... Scribble in the works. In related news, Microsoft announced Scribble, an authoring tool designed to help "nonprogrammers" create interactive products for Microsoft Network. The product will be free to publishers, but the beta version will not...

NetQuest on the net. (ConQuest)(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... The latest full-text vendor to embrace the Internet is ConQuest. Its NetQuest architecture lets users run queries against external databases, even those indexed by non-ConQuest engines. Initially developed for the U.S. federal government,...

Folio retreiver. (Retriever)(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... Folio has delivered its Web server product to the field and is now offering Retriever, which nabs Web pages and copies them into flat files that can be automatically loaded into your own Folio infobase. Once converted, Folio Views users not...

Web in a box. (Pacific Internet Web-in-a-Box)(Product Announcement)(Brief Article) (Product Announcement)
July 17, 1995... As an alternative to Sun, IBM, Macintosh or nt Web servers, Pacific Internet has introduced a turnkey package for creating a Web server on a Pentium pc running under Unix. Called Web-in-a-Box, the $5,000 package includes a 90-mhz Pentium loaded...

UB Networks builds Web pages. (Interactive Initiative)(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... A recent trend among Internet providers is to offer Web page services. An example is UB Networks, whose Interactive Initiatives specializes in helping customers "set up a commercial presence" on the Web. Its package, InterWeb, includes design...

Yellow pages directory on the Web.(http://www.index.org)(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... Want an alphabetized index of the Web? HLC Internet, Inc., a national Internet service provider based in Irvine, CA, has joined with other Internet service firms in offering a comprehensive "Yellow Pages" directory of Web sites. Standard...

Upgrades offered for HyperCard, SuperCard.(Apple Computer Inc's HyperCard 2.3.)(Product Announcement)(Brief Article)
July 17, 1995... It's been quite a while since we reported any developments with Apple's HyperCard. (We last covered the release of version 2.0 five years ago in Vol. 4, No. 11.) Apple has now upgraded the product to version 2.3 and has added color and...