Called Bomb Squad Help Desk, all it does is offer help -- no applications, no research, just a growing database of more than 50,000 calls.

XPress yourself
The innovative effort that once went into page layout programs has been shifted into creating web pages, or repurposing content for them.

Layout programs have been rather static, while web-page programs have proliferated. For newspapers, the main effort has been to get pages from Quark XPress into HTML. Not too many newspapers are creating web pages that are entirely different than newspaper offerings, but software for both camps could be found everywhere on the floor at Seybold.

HexWeb XT, an XTension from HexMac of Stuttgart, Germany, enables newspapers to create elegant "shovelware" from Quark pages with little extra staff. In fact, once the planning of the look of the site's pages is determined and coded, and templates and categories set, one person can quickly and efficiently turn Quark pages into web pages.

Headline typographical variety can be preserved by turning headlines into GIFs, and text-formatting options include left indents and drop caps.

HexWeb has a few minor drawbacks. It uses the Mac's color palette as the default for graphics, so there may be some color oddities when Windows-based browsers access the pages. And, if after selecting elements on a Quark page, converting and exporting them, the results as seen through a browser need changing, you do have to start all over again.

But it is a very simple tool for repurposing content that isn't at all labor intensive, and list price is a mere $349. HexWeb XT is being distributed by Managing Editor Inc. of Jenkintown, Pa.

Managing Editor showed the newest version of its classified layout system, Page Director Cls 2.0, and gave another sneak peek at the Roundhouse Ad Tracking system, basically a spreadsheet-type interface with drag-and-drop support that was unveiled in June at NEXPO '96 in Las Vegas. The database runs on a Windows NT SQL server.

Over at Quark Inc. of Denver, Seybold happened and Quark Immedia shipped. Immedia is the apple of Quark's eye, or more like the apple stuck in Quark's craw.

A multimedia XTension for XPress, Immedia is a lot more than another repurposing tool. With a little simple massaging, an XPress page can come alive with video, sound and animation. It's pretty much what you can do with some HTML coding, the right browser, helper applications and a few good Java applets.

Touted as the next great idea last year, the beta gestation period of Immedia proved to be rather long. What happened between the time Quark conceived Immedia and its birth has been vast and rapid change in the web and the Internet.

I hesitate to say the product is stillborn, because it adds value to existing Quark pages in an extremely easy way for the legions of Quark users. But perhaps those legions of Quark users would rather have had the Quark Publishing System beefed up, or be working with XPress 4.0 by now.

Hey, I really like what Quark has done for page layout, but now it's time for some tough love: Immedia will never be Quark's corporate cash cow.

Builder in a box
For those papers that want to go all out and repurpose the heck out of newspaper content, there's Pantheon Builder from Pantheon Inc. of Seattle.

In little more than a year, former employees of Spry Inc., the company that gave the world "Internet in a Box," have come up with software that can automatically convert electronic files from any editorial computer system into HTML. Currently, converting electronic files from newspapers into HTML is hampered by the many proprietary systems still in use to process the bulk of newspaper text.

Pantheon Builder automatically organizes and indexes web page stories and photos, and can automatically edit, modify and delete information within a web page. Builder uses a powerful indexing ability to automatically create hotlinks to other web sites.

Pantheon Builder runs on an IBM PC or compatible, which serves as a gateway between a legacy front-end system and a web server. Pricing varies with the size of the installation, but starts at $6500. Currently, version 2.0 is shipping

If you are starting from scratch with content, you might ring up Ringmaster from Ikonic of San Francisco. Loosely, it's the Quark Publishing System for web pages.

It's a three-ring circus -- submit, accept or reject, and keep the whole thing on-line. Supporting Sun Solaris 2.5, Windows 95 and Windows NT servers, and Windows 95, Windows NT and Macintosh clients, Ringmaster can start small (a trio of clients and one server) to larger (a dozen clients and one server). Special prices through this month range from $299 to $2999.

Just as with paper publishing, you get content history, security and editorial control of the approval process. For webmeisters' convenience, you get an up-to-date content map and automatic link synchronization as files move to different areas of a site.

It's all done with a good old drag-and-drop interface, available now on all Ringmaster-supported systems.

Workgroup publishing is now available for the Web.

Net Objects Fusion for Windows 95 and Windows NT, out of Redwood City, Calif., is a suite of applications that automates the creation of web pages with point-and-click simplicity, and allows links to other information from a spreadsheet or SQL database.

The Net Objects warehouse contains many prefab parts and tools to control a site and the pages in it. No server is necessary to run Fusion, but you must have at least 16 megabytes of memory and 40 megabytes of hard disk space for full installation. Minimal installation uses 10 megabytes.

It's very visual and very slick. It's what brought the 24 Hours in Cyberspace web site to the World-Wide Web earlier this year (see The Cole Papers, January 1996 and March 1996).

For Windows users, this is easily the best of the litter.

Font fun
The Macintosh brought an avalanche of fonts to the newsroom. A decade and several thousand fonts later, it's still a big pain to keep those fonts organized on several computers and ever-lengthening font menus in check.

Help in this regard is just around the corner. Forget the font folder provided with the Macintosh, or the two most popular font organizers, Suitcase and Master Juggler. There are so many of the critters, in so many families and versions, you just about need a database to control 'em.

And that's what Font Reserve from DiamondSoft Inc. of Mill Valley, Calif., is: intelligent database technology for fonts. It supports all Macintosh font formats. It matches printer and screen fonts. It compares and removes duplicate fonts. It checks for font corruption or damage. It will classify fonts into categories.

A demo version should be available now. The single-user cost is $119.95, with site license pricing options to be announced before the full release.

Moral fiber
Another product that should have been around years ago comes from a company called Augment Systems Inc. of Westford, Mass.

Take the 1 gigabit-per-second bandwidth of Fiber Channel Arbitrated-Loop, which can run at speeds up to 10 times faster than Fast (100 baseT) Ethernet, match it with a pair of servers that are controlled by Macintoshes sporting pumped-up Mac software that can turn anyone into a crack server administrator in a few easy lessons, and you have another great server for the Mac platform on the heels of Apple's UNIX-based servers.

Too bad that at the start of the '90s, when Macs were slipping into the newsroom faster than new employees, there was nothing that could begin to meet the needs of daily newspaper production.

Now there's the Afx 210 and 410, hefty boxes with lots of power. The 210 can have up to three processors and 30 internal bays for 3.5-inch drives in various Raid configurations. The 410 can have up to six processors.

SuperServer indeed.

The Augment folks have devised a proprietary system to handle all this speed and power, but it runs from a Power Mac 7200. A Raid disk array looks like a single disk.

The SuperServer File Manager software is "more Macintosh than the Mac," said Augment's senior software engineer, David Neal. It's the ultimate in drag-and-drop, with the ability to include nearly all server management functions in a user-configurable set of windows just as big as the monitor screen.

Existing Ethernet networks can tap into this power and speed, with fiber links for the most graphically-intensive tasks now, and the ability to add more later.

Memory is inexpensive now, so some papers might be able to afford six processors with 128 megabytes of memory each. Include 100 gigabytes of storage, and it's obvious this machine can be a prime-time player.

21st century standard: Microsoft, Kodak, Netscape, Hewlett-Packard and Live Picture announced at Seybold San Francisco that they were all supporting the new FlashPics standard, which will provide for better resolution and faster transmission of digital art and photographs. Resolution independence has been available for graphics in PostScript for a decade; with the support of those suppliers, FlashPics should become the standard for images into the next century.

-- George Powell

Augment Systems Inc.,
(508) 392-8626;
Bomb Squad Help Desk,
(515) 270-4800;
DiamondSoft Inc.,
(415) 381-3303;
Ikonic,
(415) 908-8000;
Live Picture Inc.,
(800) 742-7900;
Managing
Editor Inc.,
(800) 638-1214;
NetObjects,
(415) 482-3200;
Pantheon Inc.,
(206) 628-3411;
Quark Inc.,
(303) 894-8888;
Viaweb Inc.,
(617) 876-2692;
Wham!Net,
(612) 373-7070.

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