Fonts, PostScript, color, multivendor systems, electronic distribution & System integration: Seybold Seminars '90.

Fonts, postScript, Color, Multivendor Systems, Electronic Distribution & System Integration

AFTER NINE YEARS on the west coast, Seybold Seminars moved to Boston this year. The tenth annual industry gathering started the new decade with discussions of a range of topics that reflected both how much the industry has changed over the past decade and how much more it is likely to change in the coming decade.

When we started the Seminars nine years ago, we did so because we believed that the industry was entering a period of profound change. This certainly proved to be the case. In the early years, strategies for pagination, batch vs. interactive systems, WYSIWYG screen displays, the potential of laser xerographic output, and (later) font technologies and page description languages were the roots of exciting discussions.

Things are different now. The intermingling of publishing technology and mainstream computer technology is so complete that most of the exciting technological issues are driven by companies and forces beyond the traditional bounds of the publishing industry: fonts, PDLs, device-independent color space, data compression for color images, data standards for information interchange, networking, file management and job tracking facilities, hardcopy color imaging technologies, capabilities of computer platforms and operating environments, and so forth. All of these are just as important as were the earlier round of technology issues, but they are no longer solely publishing-specific.

Beyond this, a lot of new technologies originating in other industries will …