The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems articles from December 1991

The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems archives from December 1991

Crosfield's PAT: marrying desktop and professional color. (summary of feature story on Page Assembly Tower graphics system)
December 30, 1991... FOR SEVERAL YEARS, vendors of "high-end" color prepress systems have been grappling with the encroaching presence of "desktop" and "midrange" color systems. The once-clear distinctions between the mass-market and professional color systems...

Demand printing in spotlight at Xplor. (summary of feature story on Xplor exhibition)
December 30, 1991... EVER SINCE the Xerox 9700 made its debut, the goal of making a huge industry out of printing documents on demand has loomed large in the minds of visionaries. Tex books, technical manuals and even novels have been viewed as ripe targets for...

Calendar supplement. (introduction of Seybold calendar supplement)
December 30, 1991... PRINTED AS A SEPARATE section but mailed with this issue is our annual calendar of events for next year and beyond. Our biggest calendar ever, it begins with a list of key events for 1992 and follows with a detailed, month-by-month calendar.

Twenty, ten and five years ago.
December 30, 1991... "Just about a year ago Photon released the bombshell announcement that it would market a new CRT photo-typesetter to be developed by Autologic, Inc., at that time a subsidiary of Alphanumeric. The specifications quoated for the new machine...

ALG to offer free color design seminar. (Advanced Laser Graphics)
December 30, 1991... Advanced Laser Graphics, a Macintosh-based system integrator and reseller, will offer another in its series of free seminars on design and color prepress on Jan. 15, 1992. It will be held at the Omni Inner Harbor Hotel in Baltimore, MD, from...

Crosfield's Page Assembly Tower: countering the midrange challenge. (graphics system)
December 30, 1991... WITH THE GROWTH of desktop color, the established high-end color suppliers have begun to offer ways to link up with desktop color pagination as an alternative for both scanning and output. In some cases, these vendors are backing alternative...

Notes from Xplor: the current state of electronic printing. (1991 Xplor exhibition)
December 30, 1991... PEOPLE IN THE GRAPHIC ARTS -- as opposed to the large corporations -- often think of electronic printing in terms of PostScript laser printers turning out five, ten or twenty pages a minute. But there is a different realm of electronic...

Cook quits Du Pont, team of 4 appointed. (Gary Cook) (The Latest Word)
December 30, 1991... Gary Cook, the career Du Pont executive who had been given the key role at the top of the new Printing and Publishing Division, has resigned from Du Pont. Cook, who had been named vice president and general manager last May (see Vol. 20, No....

Berthold adapts strategy to market. (H. Berthold AG) (The Latest Word) (Company Profile)
December 30, 1991... In the view of much of the world, H. Berthold AG has been somewhat of an enigma in recent years. Historically, it has had a reputation of nearly phenomenal success in its home Germany, while teetering on the brink of oblivion in the U.S. and...

Court in first action on Monotype-ITC suits: Seattle site picked, quick end sought. (Monotype Typography Inc., International Typeface Corp.) (The Latest Word) (Company Profile)
December 30, 1991... In the latest issue of our Report on Desktop Publishing (Vol. 6, No. 5), we commented on two lawsuits filed in conjunction with Monotype's licensing of fonts to Microsoft for use in its Tr eType format. In one suit, the International...

SII to reenter midrange market. (Systems Integrators Inc.) (The Latest Word) (Company Profile)
December 30, 1991... For the last decade or so, System Integrators has been known as a very successful supplier of systems to the high end of the newspaper market. But before that, it had concentrated on the smaller and midrange papers. It is about to return to...

New SGML products debutat CALS Expo. (Computer-Aided Acquisition and Logistics Support) (The Latest Word) (Company Profile)
December 30, 1991... In just a few yews, the annual CALS Expo has grown into a major event for the U.S. defense industry. Because Congress has curbed defense spending growth, the Computer-Aided Acquisition and Logistics Support (CALS) initiative is steadily...

Crosfield, Scitex keep Imprinta plans veiled. (Imprinta exhibition) (The Latest Word)
December 30, 1991... In the past weeks, we have had a flurry of activity in Europe as a number of vendors present what they are planning for February's Imprinta exhibition in Germany. This show is increasingly being seen as one of the key exhibitions in the...

Scitex reports stunning profits. (The Latest Word)
December 30, 1991... Perhaps the highlight of the Scitex press conference was the impressive financial results reported by Scitex president and CEO Arie Rosenfield. He reported that both revenues and profits were substantially up over the first nine months...

New test of screening. (screening technology quality) (The Latest Word)
December 30, 1991... As a followup to our tutorial on screening for four-color printing (see the Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing, Vol. 6, No. 2), Seybold Publications and Seybold Seminars are preparing a test suite to evaluate screening quality. Test files...

People. (The Latest Word)
December 30, 1991... Rich Buccheim has left his position as VP of engineering at Camex to join GammaGraphx, a recent startup company that specializes in print-on-demand systems. Jerry Jeronimides has joined Penta as VP international marketing and sales. He...

Production note. (how issue is produced) (The Latest Word)
December 30, 1991... We get a lot of phone calls asking what equipment we use to produce our publications. In the interest of answering those queries--and perhaps providing some useful information to other readers--we are starting a regular column on how we...

1992 calendar of events.
December 30, 1991... Once again, we have exceeded all previous efforts in the formation of our calendar of events, and for the first time, we will be able to publish our calendar more than once a year (see Production Notes in this issue). This year's calendar...

On the road to portable color. (preview of featured article on portable color standards) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... THE ONGOING STRUGGLE to agree on standards for making printed color communication more predictable is progressing. An ANSI IT8 subcommittee is in the final stages of developing a series of input and output targets (right) for scanner and...

Two views of the future of newspapers. (preview of the featured article on the future of newspapers) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... NEWSPAPERS MAY NOT be buying much equipment these days, but there are still a lot of papers using old systems that will need to be brought up to date one way or another, by being added to or replaced. Primary among the papers' considerations...

Multimedia action at CD-ROM Expo (preview of featured article on CD-ROM Expo in Washington, DC) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... NOT SURPRISINGLY, multimedia products grabbed the spotlight at the recent CD-ROM Expo in Washington. There were new classes of delivery systems (the handheld Sony Data Discman and the Commodore CDTV and Philips CD-I Imagination Machine for...

Twenty, ten and five years ago. (excerpts from previous articles in the journal) (Column)
December 6, 1991... Vol. 1, No. 7 (Nov. 22, 1971) The feature article was an overview of CRT editing terminal technology. "Why shift now to this topic when we haven't begun to exchaust the subject of typesetting devices? It is our feeling that, in...

Progress in standards for portable color: report from Laser in Graphics. (topics at Oct 27-31, 1991, conference in Tarpon Springs, FL, include developments in and groups involved in developing prepress color communications standards) (Cover Story)
December 6, 1991... FOR YEARS, Dunn Technologies' annual Lasers in Graphics conference has served as a bellwether of the high end of the color prepress market. Attenders hear discussions about whether or not lower-priced prepress systems and products woudl...

Systems of today and the future: a tale of two newspapers. (how the "Daily Oklahoman" near Oklahoma City, OK, and the "Morning News" of Dallas, TX, successfully implemented new systems for pagination and color) (Cover Story)
December 6, 1991... LAST YEAR, prior to our newspaper tutorial in the Boston area, we did a case study of a few medium-sized dailies--papers that were on the leading edge of technology. This year, we decided to see what a few of the larger papers were up to....

Report from CD-ROM Expo: more formats, titles, questions. (new CD-ROM publishing tools and services, muliple formats, new titles and hardware, classroom products and publishers' quandry are subjects at Oct 1991 conference in Washington, DC; includes related article on where to obtain more information about CD-ROM) (Cover Story)
December 6, 1991... MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTS, as usual, created the most obvious excitement at CD-ROM Expo, held in Washington, DC, in mid-October. This year, there were real products for the multimedia formats--Tandy's and Microsoft's Multimedia PC (MPC), Philips's...

Kodak shows fast network printers: PostScript, remote printing. (introduces 1370 and Lionheart 1392 PostScript printers plus Lionheart networking upgrade for previous model 1570 and 1575 printers) (Product Announcement)
December 6, 1991... Kodak used the Xplor conference (in Phoenix Nov. 16-22), the annual meeting of the users' group for high-speed laser printers, to announce some new products and features. PostScript at 70 ppm. The major new item was the 1370 PostScript...

Varityper announces 40-MHz Emerald RIP: Musicians in 18:08 with Dual Page Buffer. (Musicians benchmark runs very quickly when raster image processor used with new buffer) (Product Announcement)
December 6, 1991... Varityper has announced an Emerald RIP that uses a 40- MHz version of the MIPS R3000 chip. When used in conjunction with Varityper's new Dual Page Buffer, the new Emerald produces some fast output times, according to our tests. The...

KeyLiner adds stripping to Xpress: quick, repeatable accuracy. (DataStream's new $2,500 KeyLiner extension to Quark Xpress turns a digitizer-equipped Macintosh into a stripping station) (Product Announcement)
December 6, 1991... DataStream is now offering KeyLiner, a Quark Xtension with accuracy up to 1/1000 of a unit that turns a Mac with a digitizing tablet into an electronic stripping workstation. On of the strengths of the program lies in its tools for quick...

URW software for better justification: alternate characters, kerning on the fly. (URW's hz-Program software module employs new justification algorithm; probably will not debut soon) (Product Announcement)
December 6, 1991... URW has announced a new approach to the age-old problem of justifying lines of text without excessive hyphenation or excessive variation in interword spacing. It is part of a software module, still in development, called the hz-Program. ...

The secret of Gutenberg. (Gutenberg used 290 characters of varying width with ligatures and abbreviations to achieve consistent justified text; the hz-Program of URW brings electronic typography closer to this level of quality) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... What makes the Gutenberg Bible the unattainable masterpiece of the art of printing? The printing on a handpress? Not really, because of today's standards, the inking was not of extraordinary quality. We could order hand-made rag paper also...

Kodak forms new Imaging Group; aligns imaging products along vertical, horizontal lines. (products and functions of vertical-market business units and Horizontal Business Organization units are described)
December 6, 1991... Kodak has redesigned the organizational structure for its newly formed Imaging Group, which combines Kodak's former Photographic Products, Commercial Imaging and International groups. Several publishing-related groups are affected by the new...

Intergraph enhances DP/Studio: taking the show on the road. (enhancements in the color image manipulation software package)
December 6, 1991... Taking the show on the road In our coverage of Intergraph over the last few months, we have focused on the ground-breaking software developed for TV Guide, on the new DP/Layout product, and on the very-large-format imagesetter from...

Pixie handles image database, archiving: product line of Cleopatra, Cassandra, Claudius and Cato. (Oslo, Norway's Pixie International A/S introduces Cassandra image- and text-archiving software, Claudius hierarchical image data base management system and Cato form filling system) (Product Announcement)
December 6, 1991... Product line of Cleopatra, Cassandra, Claudius and Cato A company named Pixie International, which is now based in Norway, has developed software for image archiving, image databases and form filling. It runs on '386 PCs....

LVT designs recorder for service bureaus: faster, smaller format, higher res. (Kodak subsidiary Light Valve Technologies introduces Model 1012 color film recorder) (Product Announcement)
December 6, 1991... Faster, smaller format, higher res Light Valve Technologies (LVT), a Kodak subsidiary, has introduced a new model of its color film recorder that was designed specifically to meet the demands of service bureaus. It also increased the...

People. (new appointments and resignations in the publishing systems and related industries) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... We reported recently the appointment of Harold Evans as senior vice president of sales and marketing at Leaf Systems. In two other announcements, Leaf has filled out its senior management team with Brian Eastman as senior vice president of...

Purup adds label product to Mac lineup: part of family with forms module. (forms specialist introduces Lineart-Expert label production software package) (Product Announcement)
December 6, 1991... Purup has added a label production software package for the Macintosh to its lineup of specialized composition products. The software, called Lineart-Expert, joins FormsExpert as Purup products that have been ported to the Macintosh from...

Wire service reception on the Macintosh: MacTelegram from Sweden. (Mediaconcept AB introduces MacTelegram wire service software package) (Product Announcement)
December 6, 1991... Mediaconcept AB, a Swedish company, has developed a wire service data reception software package for the Macintosh. Called MacTelegram, the software is based on Acius's Fourth Dimension (4D) database software, although the main parts are...

Xyvision open to any X system. (Xyvision announces that its desktop publishing software works under Macintosh, IBM PC-compatible and most UNIX-based computers running X Windows) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... As we reported in October (Vol. 21, No. 3, p. 22), Xyvision has been working to support X-terminals other than those made by Digital Equipment. Xyvision recently announced that its publishing software now runs under X Window on Macintoshes,...

G.O. Graphics supports Catalyst. (One-for-All printer software files can be transferred to and manipulated and output by the Catalyst graphics software) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... G.O. Graphics, which has installed about 150 units of its One-for-All output system, is offering capabilities for Catalyst users. The program, which takes data from Agfa front-end systems (MCS, PowerView, Integrator, etc.) and drives...

CSE adds features to MacPage: AdWeek doing all editorial pages. (enhancements to Compatible Systems Engineering's page layout software briefly described; CSE supplied system to AdWeek and has contract for new PC Magazine hardware/software system)
December 6, 1991... Compatible Systems Engineering has added some nice features to its MacPage system for designing page layouts that can be used with its editorial network or some other vendors' systems. Meanwhile, CSE said AdWeek magazine is now producing all...

GTE offers ImageSpan for image transfer: high speed across wide areas. (introduces ImageSpan hardware/software solution for networks) (Product Announcement)
December 6, 1991... GTE, a newcomer to publishing shows, recently attended the Seybold Computer Publishing Conference to show the publishing industry how it could help solve the high-speed transfer of images in a "global wide-area network" configuration. Its...

Penta. (announces sales of one MV/3500 and three DeskTopPro composition systems) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... Penta has announced new sales to four existing customers, including three purchasing DeskTopPro interactive composition systems and one an MV/3500: * Parkwood Composition (New Richmond, WI), a division of St. Croix Press--a 21-MPS AV/310...

Optronics. (installs ColorSetter 4000 imagesetter at Hanson Graphics of Memphis, TN)
December 6, 1991... Optronics has installed the first production unit of its 4,000-dpi, large-format ColorSetter 4000 imagesetter at Hanson Graphics (Memphis, TN). The ColorSetter 4000 will be linked to a Mac II with an fx accelerator board, which will be fed...

Du Pont Printing and Publishing. (Morning News Tribune of Tacoma, WA, purchases Du Pont's Whirlwind Display Ad System turnkey system) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... The Tacoma (WA) Morning News Tribune has purchased a complete Whirlwind Display Ad System (Breeze) from Du Pont Printing and Publishing. The system includes terminals, database and imagesetters with a total value of $1.15 million. The...

Bestinfo. (installs Wave4 turnkey publishing system at US Chamber of Commerce) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... Bestinfo has installed a Wave4 system at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for the production of its monthly Nation's Business and its supplement The Business Advocate. The system includes PICS/RIP/Collage color page processing modules, five...

Reference Technology. (receives $250,000 contract to provide ReferenceSet CD-ROM development software to the US Navy) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... Reference Technology has been awarded a $250,000 contract by the Navy for ReferenceSet, a product designed for CD-ROM development. The Navy plans to use ReferenceSet to create CD-ROMs in three locations that handle fleet material support,...

Frame Technology. (Control Data Corp. selects Frame's FrameMaker and FrameViewer publishing software for creating and distributing technical documentation for the Flight Analysis and Design System project headed by Loral Space Information Systems) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... Frame Technology's Frame Maker and Frame Viewer publishing software products have been selected as the documentation products for the Flight Analysis and Design System (FADS). Control Data Corp. (CDC), the computer system integrator that was...

Sixty Eight Thousand. (sells 20 Dash 30fx tower workstations to Lintas Marketing Communications) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... Lintas Marketing Communications has purchased 20 Sixty Eight Thousand Dash 30fx workstations. Each 50-MHZ Dash 30fx tower workstation is configured with 64 MB of RAM. Sixty Eight Thousand now has an installed base of more than 400...

Autologic. (company's German office installs $2 million worth of page composition systems in 1991) (Brief Article)
December 6, 1991... Two million dollars' worth of orders coming into Autologic's German office at the end of 1990 have been installed in 1991. New customers include: Kolner Stadtanzeiger, Lubecker Nachrichten and Repro Studio, Munchen. The system at the Kolner...

Xyquest ships DOS version of Signature. (acquired from IBM, Signature is basically Xyquest's XyWrite word processing software with a graphical user interface) (Product Announcement)
December 6, 1991... Graphical XyWrite is here at last! When IBM's Desktop Software division folded in October, Signature--basically XyWrite with a GUI--was orphaned on the eve of its planned "birth" (see the Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing, Vol. 6, No. 2,...