The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems articles from January 1994

The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems archives from January 1994

Agfa unveils Avantra recorders, focusing on top-quality color. (summary of feature article)
January 17, 1994... Although the SelectSet 5000 and 7000 continue to be dominant forces in the imagesetter market, Agfa has unveiled a family of new-generation machines aimed at a higher quality level than has been targeted previously. Called the SelectSet Avantra...

Tegra-Varityper gains speed, productivity with Series 3000, 5300H. (summary of feature article)
January 17, 1994... Many people had thought that the PostScript speed wars were over because rips and recorders were so fast that there weren't enough differences among the various products to matter. But when we saw some of the performance levels achieved by the...

Typomania, Selected Essays on Typesetting Subjects.
January 17, 1994... While it is not our normal practice to review books in this publication, we are making an exception to comment on the work of a long-time friend and associate, Lawrence Wallis. Wallis has been a key influence on the growth of the worldwide...

Agfa's SelectSet Avantra: addressing the future with new technology. (internal-drum imagesetter) (Product Announcement)
January 17, 1994... "You could take it apart and teach a physics class with it," the new Agfa poster says. And to a certain extent, that is a point well taken. The "it" being considered is the new Avantra model of the SelectSet internal-drum imagesetter. And the...

Tegra-Varityper: attacking output speed and productivity head-on.
January 17, 1994... Old-timers in the industry still may think of Varityper as the vendor of composition equipment for the "little guy," the person who needs solid, reliable machines without the bells and whistles that would result in unaffordable prices. The...

Photonics of UK acquires Itek Colour Graphics: no changes planned in management. (Photonics Holdings) (The Latest Word)
January 17, 1994... Photonics Holdings, a British company with interests in graphic arts, recently purchased a majority interest in Itek Colour Graphics, the long-time supplier of color scanners, recorders and prepress systems. Photonics bought an 80% share of...

Triple-I on the move as downsizing continues; relocation imminent as 40 laid off. (Information International Inc.) (The Latest Word)
January 17, 1994... Once again, the rumor mill is rampant with stories about Information International, focusing mostly on financial matters. Rumors have been encouraged by the knowledge that the company was planning to relocate its operations to lower-priced...

Kodak announces Photo CD Access Plus. (access software for Photo CD) (The Latest Word) (Product Announcement)
January 17, 1994... Kodak recently announced the next generation of its popular Photo CD Access software called Access Plus. Aimed at professional photographers and graphic arts professionals, it lets users read and display Photo CD Master and Pro Master images...

Correction: Balise price is for upgrading. (Berger-Levrault's Balise 2.1 software) (The Latest Word) (Correction Notice)
January 17, 1994... Berger-Levrault informs us that the pricing of Balise 2.1 that we reported in our last issue was actually the upgrade maintenace fee, not the license fee. The actual prices for single-user licenses are $3,100 (FFr16,500; DM4,950) for dos;...

Xyvision to distribute Advent's 3B2/Diamond. (composition product) (The Latest Word)
January 17, 1994... Advent has finally found a North American distributor for its 3B2/Diamond composition product, which has been successful in the UK and Europe but has never achieved the worldwide marketing success to reflect its potential. Xyvision will be...

Original owner buys back Talbot operation; Clunies-Ross regains firm from St. Ives. (Andrew Clunies-Ross, Talbot Publishing Systems) (The Latest Word)
January 17, 1994... Andrew Clunies-Ross, managing director and original owner of Talbot Publishing Systems of the UK, has reacquired the interest in Talbot that he had sold to St. Ives plc in 1990. The terms of the deal, which was announced on Jan. 4, were not...

People.
January 17, 1994... IDI (Information Dimensions) has appointed Morton Sinkoff vp of marketing. An expert in strategic planning and marketing, he had been president of an information management consulting firm following a 28-year career with IBM. At IBM he had...

AB Dick to market system. (publishing system) (Briefly...)
January 17, 1994... AB Dick to market system. AB Dick of the UK will market a pc-based publishing system supplied by Acorn Computers. The system, to be called Graphtex, includes a risc computer, a scanner, a printer and Impression II publishing software from...

Secma cuts prices in U.S. (Secma International USA's MaxiSwift drum imagesetter line) (Briefly...)
January 17, 1994... Secma cuts prices in U.S. After setting up a manufacturing facility in California, Secma International has cut prices by 30% across its entire drum imagesetter line. A MaxiSwift system imaging up to 43*x54* now sells for $275,000. Secma also...

ECRM supports Berthold. (introduces conversion kit that allow Berthold imagesetting systems to add new recorders) (Briefly...)
January 17, 1994... ECRM supports Berthold. ECRM has begun offering a conversion kit that enables owners of Berthold imagesetting systems to support PostScript compatibility and add new recorders. It will allow a user to send Berthold or PostScript files to...

Cal Poly seeks gifts. (the California Polytechnic State University's Graphic Communications Department seeks funds for Electronic Prepress Laboratory) (Briefly...)
January 17, 1994... Cal Poly seeks gifts. The Graphic Communications Department of California Polytechnic State University is looking for cash to fund an advanced Electronic Prepress Laboratory. The lab will be used for classes in electronic publishing systems,...

Quark lists QPS installations. (The Latest Word)
January 17, 1994... Quark has announced a number of QPS installations. In the listing that follows, the QPS statistics refer respectively to the number of installed CopyDesk units, Dispatch servers and total connections (users). International sites include: *...

Atex. (order from Philadelphia Newspapers, Landmark Communications Group and Casa Grande Valley Newspapers Group) (Installations)
January 17, 1994... Atex has announced a $1.5 million order received from Philadelphia Newspapers (Knight Ridder) and two other orders for smaller systems: * Philadelphia Newspapers (publishers of the Philadelphia Inquirer, circ. 505,000, and Daily News, circ....

P.Ink. (at Toronto Sun Publishing Corp.) (Installations)
January 17, 1994... The Toronto Sun Publishing Corp. has announced a decision to replace existing editorial systems at four of its ten daily newspaper sites in North America with systems from P.Ink. After extensive testing of the system at the Toronto Sun during...

Advanced Publishing Technology. (to Daily Journal Corp., Larson Newspapers, Paso Robles Newspapers) (Installations)
January 17, 1994... Advanced Publishing Technology recently announced three sales: * Daily Journal Corp., publisher of ten newspapers in the western U.S. -- 50-workstation system with two '486 file servers driving a Tegra-Varityper 5510 broadsheet plain-paper...

Harris Publishing Systems. (NewsMaker editorial system) (Installations)
January 17, 1994... Harris Publishing Systems has sold six NewsMaker systems. They all include reporter and copy editor workstations and XP-21 Page Servers. All except the Journal Star provide full backup. Customers and other system components are: * ...

Dewar and Monotype. (products installed at Journal Register Co.) (Installations)
January 17, 1994... Journal Register Company has installed systems from Dewar and Monotype, to be used at two Journal Register newspapers, the Fall River (MA) Herald News and the New Haven (CT) Register. The Dewar sale, one of the company's last direct-sellling...

Screen. (installs 700 DT-S1030AI scanners in six months) (Installations)
January 17, 1994... Screen reports that it has installed 700 DT-S1030AI scanners in six months.

Editorial Systems Engineering. (Editorial News Layout software) (Installations)
January 17, 1994... Badener Tagblatt, of Baden, Switzerland, is installing Editorial News Layout software from Editorial Systems Engineering. It will link ten workstations with an Atex front-end system. The system permits pages designed using ENL to be copyfitted...

Dice America. (installs 16 Dice Net file servers) (Installations)
January 17, 1994... Dice America (formerly Page Prep) reports 16 installations during the past year connecting its Dice Net file server with customer' networks. Fifteen are configured with MGI Solitaire film recorders and one with a Dicomed Captivator. Networks...

SGML '93: progress on all fronts. (the Graphic Communications Association's conference) (summary of featured article)
January 3, 1994... To keep abreast of the latest developments in the sgml market, we recently attended the Graphic Communications Association's Sgml '93 conference in Boston. As we have found in the past, this year's event served as a touchstone for progress in...

PostScript Forum features Acrobat, color. (summary of featured article)
January 3, 1994... Although the PostScript language long ago became an industry standard without which many of today's publishing capabilities wouldn't be possible, it is only recently that we have devoted an entire conference to the topic. The latest one, held...

New film, proofers in show spotlight. (Graph Expo) (summary of featured article)
January 3, 1994... With four big graphic arts shows in eight weeks, you'd think there would be little left for the last one. Not so, though, as Graph Expo hit Chicago with a revolutionary silverless film from Xerox, a new digital color proofer from DuPont, new...

Talo hyphenates European languages: C source code for Windows. (Talo b.v., a Dutch software company) (The Latest Word)
January 3, 1994... Another firm has entered the market for multilanguage hyphenation and spelling modules -- Talo b.v., a software company founded by Jaap Woestenburg of Bussum, the Netherlands. Talo's algorithms are based on linguistic research done early in...

Calendar dates: Nexpo, UK production forum. (Correction Notice)
January 3, 1994... We've been notified of two corrections to our annual Calendar of Events for 1994, mailed with our last issue: * Nexpo '94, the newspaper conference formerly called ANPA, is correctly listed in the Other Key Events section as occurring June...

Status report on SGML: notes from SGML '93. (Standard Generalized Markup Language) (the Graphic Communications Association's conference) (includes related article on new publications about SGML)
January 3, 1994... As the brochure advertised, the volume is cranking up on the quiet revolution. The Standard Generalized Markup Language (sgml) has not yet become a mass-market phenomenon, but within some publishing circles, sgml has already become the standard...

PostScript conference: experiences with Acrobat, color, remote output.
January 3, 1994... PostScript has evolved beyond its origins as a device-independent page description language to assume a variety of additional roles in today's digital information age. Already both a page and a display descriptor, it is rapidly evolving as a...

Verde film, color proofers wind down fall show season. (Graph Expo in Chicago) (Xerox Corp.'s new film for imagesetters)
January 3, 1994... The long fall graphic arts show season, which started way back in September with the massive IPEX show in England, came to a close early in November with Graph Expo in Chicago. In spite of the strain that was inevitable as IPEX, Seybold San...

Missing IGAS captions. (Correction Notice)
January 3, 1994... Cultural differences. Although this looks more like a seminar than a trade show to Westerners, it is a Scitex demonstration at IGAS. Above: All workstations are linked to a large display for a staged demo. The lady at the podium work from...

Indigo's ElectroInk found to be erasable. (used in E-Print 1000 digital offset press) (includes related article on top erasable printing ink applications) (The Latest Word)
January 3, 1994... Indigo has begun delivering its E-Print 1000 digital offset press to regular customers, but it has been discovered that the ink used in the machine is easily erasable, even months after it has been printed. The discovery was made...

Quark users addresses QPS 1.1, Xpress futures. (Quark Publishing System)
January 3, 1994... At a meeting of Quark users in London on Dec. 3, Susan Friedman, product manager for the Quark Publishing System, updated the audience on the status of QPS. Worldwide, there are now more than 35 authorized QPS distributors and more than 100 QPS...

Photo CD gets smaller discs, new PIW station; 80mm discs work in 120mm drives. (Kodak's Photo CD Imaging Workstation 6600) (Product Announcement)
January 3, 1994... At Comdex, Kodak announced plans to offer a smaller, 80mm disc format for Photo CD discs to accommodate the smaller format cd-rom drives that are beginning to appear in laptop and notebook computers and pdas. The discs will play also on...

Scitex revenues up, earnings down. (for third quarter 1993)
January 3, 1994... Scitex revenues up, earnings down. For its third quarter ended Sept. 30, 1993, Scitex reported revenues of $162 million, up 12% over the third quarter in 1992. However, unaudited net profitability was down considerably, to $18.1 million...

Triple-I posts losing quarter. (Information International Inc.)
January 3, 1994... Triple-I posts losing quarter. Information International reported a net loss for its third quarter of $867 thousand ($.37/share), about five cents per share higher than the comparable period a year ago. Revenues for the quarter, ended Sept. 30,...

Digital imaging tools from IronMike Software: 300 installed at 50 sites. (IronMike Plug-In Kit for Photoshop editing module, FileTransporter background control panel, CommThing image transmission software for the Macintosh and SQL-inserter plug-in module for Photoshop)
January 3, 1994... One of the consequences of the software age is the proliferation of add-on modules for use with digital imaging. With them comes a morass of slightly different file formats, compression and header schemes, not to mention archiving and image...

Scitex reorganizes senior management: after Yair Schamir resigns R&D post. (executive vice president and general manager of the Israeli operations)
January 3, 1994... Scitex has reorganized its senior management, resulting in several executive appointments to strengthen management and improve the integration of the company's divisions and subsidiaries. The changes will separate the management of the overall...

Atex. (sells its WorkGroup Publishing Systems and Architect software to Guatemala's Presa Libre) (Installations)
January 3, 1994... Atex has sold its WorkGroup Publishing Systems and Architct software to Presa Libre, Guatemala's largest newspaper. The 120,000 circulation tabloid also has acquired six PC Page Makeup workstations. The system will be in place by the end of the...

Baseview. (installations of Mac-based software) (Installations)
January 3, 1994... Baseview has announced a number of installations of its Macintosh-based software. Park Newspapers of Ithaca, NY, will install Baseview software at four of its dailies including the South Idaho Press (Burly, IA);Warner Robins (GA) Daily Sun;...

Cybergraphic. (announces system upgrade at Hong Kong Standard)
January 3, 1994... Cybergraphic has announced a $1 million upgrade at the Hong Kong Standard. The upgrade, including new hardware, software and integration services, will enable the paper to produce full-color pages straight to hole-punched film. Color images...

Digital Technology. (installs Image Speed and graphics database software at Los Angeles Times)
January 3, 1994... Digital Technology has completed installation of its Image Speed and its graphics database software at the Los Angeles Times, its graphics cataloging and search system that uses jpeg and QuickTime compression for full resolution and...

Electronic Book Technologies. (DynaText electronic document management system used by Sikorsky Aircraft)
January 3, 1994... Electronic Book Technologies has announced that its DynaText electronic document management system is being used by Sikorsky Aircraft as part of an interactive technical manual program for the U.S. Navy. To date, Sikorsky has con- verted 14,000...

John Juliano Computer. (licenses Atan Express to the New York Times)
January 3, 1994... John Juliano Computer has sold seven Atan Express licenses to the New York Times as a link between the paper's Atex system and Quark Xpress. The Times began using Xpress when it introduced color pages to its Book, Travel and Real Estate...

Monotype. (sells publishing system to Canberra Times)
January 3, 1994... Monotype has sold a system to the Canberra Times of Australia. The system includes two ExpressMaster 1200 108-pica image recorders, two ImageMaster 1200 A3 proofers, a ProofExpress A1 proofer, three RipExpress software rips running on Sun Sparc...

Quark. (announces order for QPS at the Newcastle Chronicle & Journal)
January 3, 1994... Quark announced an order for a 37-seat QPS system at the Newcastle Chronicle & Journal. The system, sold by Press Computer Systems, includes 37 connections to Quark Dispatch, 16 copies of CopyDesk, word processing software and a central...

Indigo. (sells first E-Print 1000s system to Bowater PLC)
January 3, 1994... Indigo has sold its first E-Print 1000s in Europe to Bowater plc, a printing group in the UK. The two E-Prints will be installed at Bowater's book division at Eastern Press in Reading. The E-Prints are scheduled to be shipped in the second...

Systems Integrators. (to install its RoadRunner workstations at Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper in Israel)
January 3, 1994... System Integrators will upgrade Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest daily, to a risc-based system with SII's new RoadRunner workstations. The daily, with a circulation of 300,000, will also add Scoop software. This order solidifies SII's...

Miles 33. (to install editorial, advertising and page management systems to Derbyshire Times Newspapers)
January 3, 1994... Miles 33 will install new editorial, advertising and page management systems to all six Derbyshire Times Newspapers. The order is valued at $375,000. Advertising will use Miles's Canvass client management and Space ad booking software to...

Corrections: Agile's price and pilot site. (Correction Notice)
January 3, 1994... Our Special Report from Seybold San Francisco contained two errors regarding the Agile Enterprise TeamBase management system (see part II, p. 16). First, the pilot sites are in Indianapolis and Memphis, not Minneapolis and Memphis. Second,...

Kodak Picture Exchange goes live.
January 3, 1994... Kodak Picture Exchange goes live. The Kodak Picture Exchange went online on Monday, Nov. 29, giving subscribers 24-hour access to its database of tens of thousands of images. Until the end of this year, customers who purchase the $399 Kodak...

Converting Purup logos and forms. (DigiComp's PilgrimX file format conversion software) (Product Announcement)
January 3, 1994... Converting Purup logos and forms. DigiComp of Minneapolis has announced a new software package, PilgrimX, for converting forms and logos in Purup's proprietary format into a fully editable format that is readable by Amgraf's Mecca III forms...

Secma to manufacture in U.S. (Secma International's Swiftline series of imagesetters)
January 3, 1994... Secma to manufacture in U.S. Early this year, Secma International will start manufacturing its Swiftline series of large-format laser imagesetters in a new facility in the Los Angeles area. Until now, its U.S. manufacturing operation has been...

Dicomed adds Pentium. (Imaginator Pentia, Pentia Plus, Pro and Pentia Sport series of image retouching and compositing workstations use Intel's Pentium microprocessor)
January 3, 1994... Dicomed adds Pentium. Dicomed recently unveiled a line of professional image retouching and compositing workstations based on the 66-mhz (100-mips) Pentium microprocessor at the Professional Photo & Lab Expo in London. There are three models...

Baseview adds telemarketing. (Circulation Database module of Circulation Pro newspaper circulation system)
January 3, 1994... Baseview adds telemarketing. Baseview has added a telemarketing feature to the Circulation Database module of its Circulation Pro newspaper circulation system. It provides an on-screen prompt to the telemarketer indicating which assigned...

Windows to Atex connectivity. (Softek USA's WinText 1.3 communications software) (Product Announcement)
January 3, 1994... Windows to Atex connectivity. Softek USA has announced a new version of its WinText program for '386 pcs running Windows. It provides pc-to-Atex connectivity via the Atex MDP. Version 1.3 features include full file transfer, universal keyboard...

Scitex medical imaging subsidiary. (Scitex Medical Systems Inc.)
January 3, 1994... Scitex medical imaging subsidiary. Scitex has formed a subsidiary to focus on developing systems for the medical imaging marketplace. Called Scitex Medical Systems, Inc., it will introduce two new products: the Unitone black-and-white and...

People.
January 3, 1994... Lars Janneryd has retired as deputy managing director of Crosfield after 30 years of service. Joining Crosfield and serving as sales director is Brian McBride, former IBM Unix system marketing director for Europe. Iris Graphics has named...

Season's greetings to all.
January 3, 1994... The year is at an end, so we say a fond farewell. But before we greet '94, we've a tale to tell. What a year it has been, full of new products galore. Some exciting and clever, though a few were a bore. The hot news of the year was printing a...