Unisys' Hermes: A virtually seamless environment stems from the product's heritage as being written specifically for the newspaper industry.

CCI Europe's NewsDesk: Windows may display a variety of things -- a production status directory appears to the right of windows into the graphics and picture databases.

Magnificent seven: offshore makers succeed at pagination

LAS VEGAS -- For years, we went to NEXPO (and its antecedent, ANPA/Tec) in search of Pagination, with a capital P.

Pagination solutions have been around a long time -- just ask the few Hastech sites still out there. But the early systems were just that, systems -- entities predicated on software and hardware dedicated to the task.

The advent of standard platforms and off-the-shelf software opened the door to what everyone expected would be a quick step into a full-bodied production system. Just take the best word processor, page assembly program, database and spreadsheet, unite them (somehow) and away you go.

The first such system to catch on was DewarView, which married dogs and ponies to beget pages. Today there are many similar systems. Each relies on some combination of a spreadsheet program (likely Microsoft Excel), a word processor (usually Microsoft Word), standard database (Oracle, Sybase) and almost always Quark XPress for page assembly.

In short, everyone's been writing glue software, sticking disparate parts together to make a whole. The latest sticky stuff to spurt from this tube uses Quark justification with or in place of Word, as seen at American Computer Innovators and Sysdeco, to name a couple (editor's note: many companies make pagination solutions; we do not intend to mention every one).

ACI's approach is to pop open a Quark window, so all editing is done in XPress and multiple users may access the same page. Sysdeco zaps the text to XPress from Word, justifies it and returns it to Word with XPress line enders intact.

In both cases, Quark XPress must reside on the client workstation or a server, whether the user ever will need it for actual page assembly. It's sort of the Quark XPress Preservation Act of 1996.

In any event, glue software -- sometimes dubbed middleware -- is fine. These solutions work, they get pages out and they meet the demand the industry put on its suppliers: standard this, off-the-shelf that.

The story is similar overseas, where companies dived into the pagination pool with gusto -- and a few developed proprietary software running on standard platforms. As seen at NEXPO '96, June 15-19 in Las Vegas, their approaches -- middleware and proprietary -- have much to offer the person to whom it really counts: the end user.

We count seven suppliers who offer foreign-born solutions: CCI Europe, Cybergraphic, Editorial System Engineering, Euromax, Linotype-Hell, Software Consulting Services and Unisys.

Last year, we swooned over Euromax, chiefly for its architecture (users may have a different take). This year, the runaway favorite is Unisys, a six-year-old product widely used in Europe that was introduced to the U.S. market at NEXPO.

CCI Europe and SCS have followed the middleware path, with positive results. ESE has a slick offering, as does Cybergraphic -- and for Mac bigots, there's LinoPress from Linotype-Hell.

Are these systems markedly better than their American competitors? No -- except for Unisys, which is Proprietary, with a capital P.

Selecting any system is a highly individual process, considering the unique nature of every newspaper's operation and staff. So we're not going to declare winners and losers (especially since we're not going to discuss advances in American systems).

Instead, we'll highlight alphabetically what makes these foreign offerings so attractive -- and throw darts as warranted.

As always, we'll let the buyer be the final arbiter.

CCI Europe
Clean and simple describes the CCI NewsDesk Editorial System, CCI's text-editing and page prep companion to its much prized pagination product.

Running on Windows NT, NewsDesk is one of the better adaptations of middleware, showing an attention to detail users will appreciate and demonstrating that Marietta, Ga.-based CCI well understands new newsroom realities about how news is -- or will be -- gathered and disseminated.

NewsDesk uses Microsoft Word and Windows 95 as its base (a UNIX Motif GUI also is available). It is pitched to the American market with many references to SII and Atex front-ends, with which it can work (until it supplants them outright, as is due at Phoenix Newspapers Inc.).

It's tailored to the Internet universe by storing all data in a limited version of SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language, as opposed to HTML, the language of the 'Net. Thus, moving files from the database to the print world or cyberspace is made easier, and opens the door to all kinds of product recycling in many media.

Denmark's CCI decided that reporters and editors need somewhat different tool sets, and so provides different task-oriented screens.

Reporters should like CCI's simplified (but not dumb) toolbar, which gives them what they need to write, e-mail and browse wires. They may write in whatever font and point size suits them, independent of production specs.

Because the composition engine is universal across the system, reporters can get lengths accurate for any use. If space has been allocated for a given story, one readout shows requested lines versus written lines versus fit (plus or minus). And all can be shown in WYSIWYG mode, in a separate window.

Copy editors will find the customized Word interface neatly organized, with spaces set aside for the headline, deck head, byline and text -- all mercifully bereft of markup scribbles. The screen is shared with a text window for wire copy.

Wire or news editors have a cornucopia of tools, contained in a toolbar from which windows may be opened to show text, wire copy, edition production progress and pictures.

A six-window screen may be opened to show six wire stories at once; each may be scrolled separately, and dynamic update is an option. Each story header carries 130 fields, including the first 250 characters of the story.

Pictures are displayed as thumbnails, with a separate list of headers; select an image and the corresponding caption appears in reverse video. ProofView, a window that takes up half the screen, can be used to blow up one image, or display an entire design package.

So, where did CCI let us down? One screen had way too many teeny icons to be navigable, but that's a Windows disease. CCI can be cured.

We liked CCI's version of a timepiece, like the Windows hourglass or Mac analog clock. It's a spinning barber pole.

Oh, dear. Does that mean close shaves come with every deadline?

Cybergraphic Systems Inc.
Nails. It's a doofus name for a great product.

From Down Under (U.S. office: Burlington, Mass.) comes Nails, the Newspaper Automated Intelligent Layout System. This Windows-based proprietary package is one part of Cybergraphic's Genera publishing system, which is being marketed in North America by System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento.

Other Genera components are Cyber$ell (ad entry), CyberCla$$Page (classified pagination), CyberNews (text editing), CyberPage (editorial pagination), CyberOPI and CCM (Cybergraphic Component Manager).

Editors and page designers will find a lot to like about Nails. The default screen has a text window and adjacent directory, which can reference text or image files.

Standing nearby is a file of formats -- commonly used shapes and collections of elements. Establish a space, keystroke your way through the collection of formats, then click on one; it'll be dropped in the space and trimmed to fit.

Pleasantly, much use has been made of drag-and-drop -- click on a picture or story, drag it to its place on a page and drop it. Done.

A number of parameters can be handled from the "property box," such as XY coordinates or the number of lines in the headline. Elements are assigned a total space, so changing one element within the space will change others proportionally and dynamically.

Design steps are a purely personal thing. Snap lines are arbitrary -- they can be tied to a grid, or made relative to other elements. Style sheets can be set up to facilitate one-click changes, such as boxing a story.

Jumps are made easy: Open a dialog box, choose the page and newshole shape, then click OK. Jump lines are inserted automatically, and if someone else is working on the jump page, he or she will get a message that the jump is on the way. (The story is cut into two pieces and must be edited separately, but an unjump command will reunite the parts if need be.)

As with other production systems, Australia's Cybergraphic does not employ editable WYSIWYG, so layout and editing are separate tasks. But the Genera package works so fluidly and fast that in this environment, that's not an issue.

Editorial System Engineering Inc.
Every vibrant, successful big company once was an ESE.

Three years ago, we felt trapped at one demo, looking at a couple of beta versions of Bedford, Mass.-based ESE's middleware for the newsroom. Our opinion was valued; everything was in development, or so it seemed.

This year, we regretted having put off a visit to ESE, because we discovered a smooth-as-silk pagination product we would like to know better.

The Spanish-developed ESE meshes Word and XPress, as do many suppliers, but in a way that seems remarkably pliant. Called EdBase, ESE writes in Word and H&Js in Quark, returning XPress line endings, and some useful information about story length. Also useful: On-screen notes written in Word went through justification intact, while being invisible to XPress.

EdBase had visual treats, too. In some dialog boxes, data appeared in lower boxes as upper fields were filled in, a sort of cascading effect that pleased the eye as time was saved.

Overall, the Windows 95 interface as tailored by ESE was easy to see, and use. Is there more?

Euromax
The name alone describes Euromax -- a maximum system from Europe which has many positives as a proprietary unit but some serious drawbacks for users.

Full integration is the hallmark of Euromax of Denmark (at one point it was known as Dansk Data Elektronik), whose U.S. office is in Wilder, Ky. With an Oracle database running on UNIX at its core, three client platforms (X Windows now, Win 3.x and Mac in the wings) can run off one server, so workstations can be tailored to the user's need.

Considering all that Euromax does -- from text entry to ad makeup to page assembly to element tracking -- having the ability to run the right machine for the right task is appealing. And because all data reside on servers, not on clients (the bane or blessing of X architecture), everyone with the right security level has access to all data.

The production tracking module is a high point, with such items as press configurations and color tables easily referenced. Want to add pages? Euromax will tell you how deadlines will have to change. Want to start building the Christmas issue for next year? Can do.

And one terminal can be designated as the status box, with auto refresh of edition progress displayed in a clean, sensible screen, listing such steps as empty, in process, completed, proof read and typeset.

Images are stored on their own OPI database, and are separated on input, a smart time saver. They can be brought up as thumbnails or opened for cropping (and if you exceed the scaling limit set in the system, Euromax will sound an alert).

Here we run into a good example of our problem with Euromax: Some things can be done with a mouse, others from the keyboard, but not everything has two paths. Some things simply take longer than we'd like.

Thus, cropping is mouse-driven only, so even if a desired size is known, there's no quick way to enter it. But in the editor's interface, some tasks are done through an Oracle form and cannot be done with a mouse. Time loser.

Euromax is like other systems in distributing many tasks over two windows. Articles may be previewed, but changes must be made in a text window, using an editor we found in serious need of upgrading. And then to see the changes, the text has to be reflowed in the view window -- it's not dynamic.

Rules control how laying out proceeds, which is good and bad. At one point, in trying to rejigger a box of text, the system followed rules that said a line of type must fall under a subhead -- so the reflowed box showed a blank line which had to be compensated for manually.

Layout is a Danish click-and-get two-step -- enter a number in a dialog box, click to get the result. Click-and-drag a la Quark XPress is not a feature found on Euromax. On the other hand, boxing text is a single command, automatically indenting appropriately.

Over time, as Euromax edges into the U.S. market, we'd expect some of our gripes to be addressed as a matter of meeting the market's expectations. An Americanized version could be dynamite.

Linotype-Hell Co.
Being Mac-based sets the LinoPress System apart from its other overseas competitors. Watching page assembly in the MacOS that isn't Quark XPress is refreshing.

Hauppauge, N.Y.-based Linotype-Hell can sell you everything you need to produce a newspaper, from data entry to imagesetters. Its production system is UNIX-based, feeding only Mac clients.

Reflecting its German roots, LinoPress is either text- or layout-driven. Little arrows in layout boxes are used to show how the layout can expand to accommodate all text, or can be locked so text will overrun if necessary.

Page design is made rapid by the interactivity of elements: Group a picture and text, change the picture size and the cutline and text legs shift accordingly. Change the headline point size from the keyboard and the text automatically gives ground within the prescribed area.

A single database keeps track of story pieces. Electronic scissors are used to snip stories apart to position jumps (a painfully manual task, even though jump lines are entered automatically), but the text remains a single entity in the database.

But it is an odd feeling to sit at a Mac and edit text in one window then touch a display window to see the result. LinoPress's architecture is the direction to go; now some facets of its user tools need to catch up with the rest of the system.

Software Consulting Services
Want Good News? Go talk to Fred, Ted, Tracy and Shelley at SCS.

They, and the SCS production system named Good News, herald from Italy. Ted is the text editor, Fred handles page assembly, Tracy tracks elements and Shelley dives into the database. This quartet sings in a Windows GUI over an NT or UNIX server.

Cute names aside, Good News is a full-bodied system in the SCS mold -- simple but effective (where else can you see a Mac running a DOS emulator?).

It's not an editable WYSIWYG environment, as shown by a text window adjacent to a preview display. But editing changes appear almost simultaneously as they're made, which assists in editing to fit -- you can work in the middle of the story while watching the end in the other window for overset/underset.

Pieces are linked well. Being proprietary, the composition engine is the same for text editing and page assembly. If the geometry for a story changes while it's being edited, the change is made while the file is open and the story is justified instantly.

When a story is released, it flows automatically into its assigned hole. Want to see it on the page? One way is to open the status board and click on the page; it just pops open. Multiple-user access to a page is integral.

Page design is expedited by keyboard commands, which permit one-line-at-a-time changes in sizing an element box -- no fumbling with the mouse. Macros are the magic for much of this, so it's welcome that users can save their own.

The Bad News is that Good News lacks some fundamentals. Some tasks require two steps, which is surprising considering how macro-saturated the system is. For example, jump lines have to be created and inserted manually from a library of shapes.

It might take you a couple of passes to get all your questions answered by Nazareth, Pa.-based SCS, but Fred & Co. are a pretty good gang.

Unisys Corp.
Maturity has its advantages, as the Unisys Publishing Solution demonstrates.

With 20 years' experience in the foreign market, the last six spent installing UPS, Irving, Texas-based Unisys took the year before NEXPO '96 to explore the U.S. market. Focus groups' rave reviews gave the Italian-born Unisys Publishing Solution a green light.

Thus, Unisys is on the market from Atlantic to Pacific (just don't ask for a price; only a serious buyer will be let in on that secret). UPS includes Hermes, the publishing product named for the messenger to the Greek gods; WireCenter, the wire copy management tool, and DocCenter, where published goods go to be archived.

One Cole Groupie said of Unisys, "I have seen the face of God -- Newsroom Division." Why the high praise? Chiefly because UPS is seamless; users can do so many things so effortlessly, it's damn near awesome.

Eye-catching features include a text editor in the tradition of conventional front-ends, with a move command as opposed to cut-and-paste. Each user is assigned a color, so the audit trail is truly visual, and all changes can be displayed for review. And undesirable changes can be undone instantly.

Three display modes are tailored to tasks: draft, for writers; galley, for editors, and editable WYSIWYG for designers.

The WireCenter component displays text and pictures at once. A full-text search of all text in the system (including messages) permits an editor to find just about anything quickly. Directories can be restyled on the fly to show different fields in changing circumstances (and custom displays can be stored for quick recall).

Click-and-drop choices abound, with pictures and text just a mouse drag from their homes in a layout. And laying out a page is a breeze: Create a space, name some elements and the system will prompt you with "suggested" formats suitable to the section and even page within a section.

Catch this: A container can be designated as either a text or picture box after it's in place. We've not seen that anywhere else.

Snapping elements to the page also is uniquely Unisys. Something called intelligent snap prevents elements from overlapping, and snaps can be made to a grid, a column or another object -- with preset space between as set by the user's defaults.

Elements can be shuffled about the page from the keyboard in ways Quark XPress can't, such as directing one box to fill all the space beneath it, including running around ads or other elements. Or, one keystroke will revamp the layout so that all text for a given story is flowed on the page -- no manual click-drag, drag-again until it fits.

We could -- even should -- go on, but space won't allow. Running on a 133-MHz Pentium, the Unisys package is swift and keen. It restores dignity to the maligned phrase "proprietary system," leading us to suggest that the past is the future once again.

-- Pete Wetmore

American Computer Innovators Inc.,
(413) 549-0701;
CCI Europe Inc.,
(770) 419-1588,
e-mail: edeasley@mindspring.com;
Cybergraphic Inc.,
(617) 221-0077,
e-mail: 0004484910@mcimail.com;
Editorial System Engineering Inc.,
(617) 276-9400,
e-mail: esema@eseinc.com;
Euromax,
(606) 441-1940,
e-mail: wwwemx.@dde.dde.dk;
Linotype-Hell Co.,
(516) 434-2029,
e-mail: ken_pond@linotype.com;
Software Consulting Services,
(610) 837-8484;
Sysdeco Media Group,
(617) 275-2323;
System Integrators Inc.,
(916) 929-9481,
e-mail: sii@sii.com;
Unisys Corp.,
(214) 541-8059,
e-mail: daviderdner@unn.unisys.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, August 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved.