Hot off the screen: Atex's Hot Off The Press database screen gives small workgroups big-system features at a small price.
Seybold seminar signals
suppliers' support of speed
If it was speed you wanted it was speed you got at Seybold San Francisco.
The annual fall confab, this year held Sept. 13-16, has become an international destination for the electronic publishing cognoscenti -- snippets of Japanese or French could be heard often across Moscone Center.
With more than 250 companies represented on the trade show floor, Seybold San Francisco and its springtime sequel in Boston have become the premier places to talk about computers and publishing. The Expo drew more than 38,000 people, while 3400 minds attended the concurrent conference and courses.
Speed was of the essence on the floor of the Expo -- faster output devices, faster RIPs, faster applications to take advantage of this speed. Getting answers to the questions we posed a few months back -- "Whither Apple and whither Quark?" (see The Cole Papers, August 1994) -- seemed accelerated as well.
The QPS support complex
Vast growth in the publishing world and the introduction of the Quark Publishing System have brought new constituencies, problems and opportunities to Denver-based Quark Inc.
But unlike proprietary vertical integrators whose time has come and gone, Quark is striving to be more responsive toward its customers, and coming to grips with what it should and shouldn't be attempting.
QPS users addressed the tricky question of converting to the workgroup publishing software in a symposium, "QPS: Self Integration or System Integrator?" QPS Product Manager Susan Friedman moderated the panel of six, who could report equally on their experiences with in-house integration or relying on an integrator.
Panelists included Kevin Alexander of DeskNet Inc. in New York, Mark Anderson of General Mills in Minneapolis, Tony Freeman of Publication Directions in Stamford, Conn., Bruce Kaplan of Mind Over Macintosh in Culver City, Calif., Treva Stose of Usa Weekend in Arlington, Va., Carmel Tse of Q Integrators in London, Ont., and Tom Vincent of Life magazine.
While the panelists stressed the importance of training as key to a smooth transition, noting that Quark provides great training at home in Denver, they concluded that there is no preferred way to go about installing a QPS site (there are more than 150).
Switching over from an older system was pegged at two months to a year, depending on the type of publication. Configuring QPS for deadline-intensive publications is a "big squirming mass of details," said one, although version 1.1 has quelled some of the most detailed squirming.
Panelists expressed satisfaction with the QPS Plus service plan that customers could buy for telephone support and on-site technical support if needed, but agreed that to help bring about smoothest workflow there should be an expert user of Quark XPress on site.
For a potential QPS customer, the key to selecting outside help is, "choose carefully." The moniker "Quark-authorized system integrator" only means the integrator has been trained on QPS and has passed a written exam.
As pagination of newspaper pages becomes easier and more reliable, the technical support decisions are becoming more complex for the end user. It's not such a bad deal; it just means management must pay more attention to the technical side of things.
On the floor
New owners have given new focus to Atex Publishing Systems Corp., a company that has had more than a few visions of the market -- and a few black eyes.
Not only has Bedford, Mass.-based Atex embraced PC-based publishing, it has become a Quark XTension developer. It had reason to be proud of the XTensions on display at its Seybold booth.
They came in a box about as big as a CD collection of Elton John's greatest hits, but the contents were as different as it would be if Elton had suddenly taken up the tuba and started singing in Farsi.
Using XPress (what else?) for pagination, the package of XTensions is a part of Hot Off The Press, Atex's new publishing system designed especially for the small workgroup publishing operation. Seven modules will comprise the complete product, which will be rolled out early in 1995. They are:
Press2Go Database, a flat-file proprietary (!) database which will provide the usual database functions of copyflow management, file-locking and search capability.
Press2Go Multi-User, an XTension which allows two or more people to work on components of a Quark XPress document at the same time.
Press2Go Editor, an XTension that creates a text editor in Quark XPress, rather than editing copy within the actual layout.
Press2Go Writer, a text processor for writers and editors. (Other word processors can be used to create text.)
Press2Go Line Count, an XTension that calculates the copy length and gives the amount of overset, if any, for a given copy space in a layout.
Press2Go Place, which allows a user to place a story directly from the database into the Quark XPress page without resorting to the Get Text command.
Press2Go Messenger, a system utility that alerts users when predefined events occur within Hot Off The Press.
Available in the CD-size package now are Press2Go Multi-User, Line Count and Editor, and two additional XTensions, Press2Go Jump Document and Smart Shapes.
Jump Document does something unique in Quark XPress: create jump links that flow a single story into two or more documents. Smart Shapes allows the resizing and/or rescaling of grouped text and picture boxes without first ungrouping them.
Both these highly useful products are available now, and can be purchased separately from Hot Off The Press.
This publishing package for the Macintosh is well thought out for what it is: something to aid small publishing workgroups already using Quark XPress. The flat-file database would never be adequate for larger publishing enterprises, but Atex marketers report that a relational database for Hotp is being developed in Sweden.
For about what it would have cost to buy one Atex terminal 15 years ago, you can set up a small workgroup: The five XTensions are available now through XChange for $750 for the set (you do have to bring your own copy of Quark XPress to this party).
As it was for Atex, so it was for several other old-line companies: a hot time for new products.
Polaroid Corp., a company somewhat peripheral to newspaper publishing, was showing new products that weren't so much a change of emphasis as a refinement of what it had been selling all along. Polaroid promoted its new slide scanner, and new color film which makes accurate in-house color available more quickly than ever.
The SprintScan 35 can zip through a slide scan in under a minute at maximum resolution of 2700 Dpi, and runs on both Windows and Mac platforms. Fast and portable at 5¢ pounds, it gets the job done with a single pass.
In combination with its CS-500i print scanner, and Print-to-Press software, Cambridge, Mass.-based Polaroid's new Polacolor Pro 100 film guarantees accurate color reproduction. The beta version of the software has been precisely calibrated to the unique characteristics of the Polacolor Pro film and the CS-500i scanner.
Future versions for the software will support other films and scanners. The final Macintosh version of Print-to-Press is expected to be available in early 1995.
Lockheed -- another major player seemingly on the fringes of publishing -- displayed improvements in the ultimate sneakernet network, DataShuttle drives.
MountainGate Data Systems, a Lockheed subsidiary based in Reno, Nev., was showing removable hard drives that held up to 2.1 gigabytes per module. These transportable modules -- just grab the handle and run -- take less space than a six-pack of beer, but could hold all the data necessary to publish a large newspaper or magazine.
Continuing the parade of old companies sporting improved wares was Xerox Graphic Systems of Stamford, Conn., which touted the commercial version of Verde digital film. This hi-res film needs no chemical processing, eliminating the task of silver recovery.
First introduced in November 1993, the new version of Verde doubles the density range of the film and makes exposure times comparable to those of standard silver halide film. (We wonder: If Xerox hits a plateau in developing this film, would it be marketed as Mesa Verde?)
Our second look at Newsware, the full-page archiving software from Iota Industries Ltd. of Israel, proved as impressive as our first (see The Cole Papers, September 1994). Hyphen Inc. of Wilmington, Mass., has acquired the worldwide marketing rights to the system and showed it prominently in its Seybold booth.
In this system, newspaper pages are scanned -- even from microfilm -- or RIPed into TIF format (using, of course, a Hyphen RIP). Then, a page geometry grid is applied to each page in the database, and the special software makes an index of that page based -- are you ready for this? -- on the geometry of the TIFF bits.
The result is a smaller file than an index of every ASCII character in every story would generate. Completed searches highlight every instance of the words found in stories, headlines or captions, and display them in page form.
Despite some problems with the search engine during the demo, Newsware offers by far the best combination of archiving text and photos in a computer-searchable database. Since this system has the ability to convert microfilm into something searchable by computer, Newsware could quickly become a new archiving standard.
On the money-making side of the show, Managing Editor Software unveiled improvements to its Ad Layout System. Since NEXPO last June in Las Vegas, two additions have made a good program better by adding greater capabilities to ALS:
Conflict Manager is an add-on module that will alert ad makeup people to conflicts in ad placement, either by a report or on-screen alert.
Edition Manager provides greatly improved multi-edition management capabilities. Multiple zones, variable ad pages within zones, complex folios or unique ad locations are no problem. Once all zone ad rules are known to the software, it's possible that one person could handle all the ad dummying for every zone edition.
Fast growth in the 1990s and acceptance of ALS by many organizations as the preferred tool for ad layout has been the good fortune of the supplier from Jenkintown, Pa. ALS now seems to do most everything associated with ad layout except find lost ads -- and bill collecting.
The Apple at the core
Executives of Apple Computer Inc. have taken a lot of heat recently for the rather steep price for upgrading to system 7.5 ($139) -- but, hey, it's for sale and Chicago (a.k.a. Windows 4.0, a.k.a. Windows 95) isn't.
It's amazing to see how the company from Cupertino, Calif., keeps accelerating the pace of change, introducing lots of new hardware and system software all in the same year. Large, attentive crowds attended all System 7.5 demos, and the booth was always crowded.
Apple's speedy new technology touches some tender spots with systems administrators already swamped by the PowerMacs and the three flavors of software necessary in a mixed Mac environment.
Their quandary: Should software be purchased in native format to take full advantage of the faster RISC-based PowerPC processors in the new Macs? Or, to maintain compatibility with software already in use, should one stick to the old 680x0-based products that can run on all Macs? Or, should one look for "fat" applications, ones that have both kinds of code, and are therefore optimized for the entire Mac base?
Clearly Apple is still trying to sort out these issues; equally clear was the promise of the new QuickDraw GX printing and font technology, which was much in evidence at the Apple booth. QuickDraw GX does away with repeated trips to the Chooser and enables drag-and-drop printing to a desktop printer icon.
But GX eats both RAM and disk space, and doesn't increase speed to match the increased convenience of real drag-and-drop printing.
Apple Computer Inc.,
(408) 996-1010;
Atex Publishing Systems Corp.,
(617) 276-1132;
Hyphen Inc.,
(508) 988-0880;
Managing Editor Software Inc.,
(800) 638-1214;
MountainGate,
(800) 556-0222;
Polaroid Corp.,
(617) 386-6452;
Quark Inc.,
(800) 788-7835;
Xerox Graphic Systems,
(800) 837-3399.
-- George Powell
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