Page layout protagonists: Adobe Systems used Seybold Boston to show InScope, left, a database management tool with which publishing systems using the InDesign page layout application can be built. Jürgen Kurz, Quark director of operations, below, said, "We now use all standard formats."

Seybold meeting focuses on efficiency, cost-reductions

BOSTON -- Easy-dot-com, easy-dot-go.

Last year's "Print-Is-Dead" theme at Seybold Boston had been tossed like yesterday's newspaper, replaced by sessions focusing on the "Dot-Bomb." Purveyors of print were proudly touting their connection to the brick-and-mortar world and the dot-comers were dot-goners.

If there was a theme to this year for the exhibits on the showroom floor, and the seminars and sessions upstairs at the Hynes Convention Center (held here April 8-13), it was that the Internet is a tool, not yet a business, and that business has to pay attention to the bottom line. Not a session went by without a reference to the economy, the rapid disappearance of last year's stars and the smaller crowds at most sessions.

As Walter Schild of Los Angeles' Genex Interactive put it, "Business wants to get things done more efficiently. They have to get costs out of their structure." Accordingly, any session in the meeting rooms at the Hynes Center that did not stay on that target were rapidly abandoned by attendees looking for their next advantage.

And advantages were there. From sessions discussing best practices for e-commerce development, a new look at digital asset and digital rights management systems, direct-to-press tools and another on how to keep employees happy, or at least keep them. The showroom floor had the suppliers showing mostly incremental advances over last year, though there was an upsurge in content management tools and everybody was replacing proprietary systems and formats with those based on Internet standards.

Not new this year, but certainly interesting, was the evolving battle between Adobe InDesign and Quark XPress. As companies look to replace the aging publishing systems installed in the '80s and '90s -- as well as hold the line on training costs -- off-the-shelf software comes to the forefront. Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose, has imbued InDesign with an interface similar to its popular Photoshop and Illustrator programs, and Quark Inc. of Denver, makes the most popular page design and layout program on the market. Systems based on either of those promise -- at the least -- a low learning curve.

Adobe advances
As it has been for the past several years (see The Cole Papers, March 1999), Adobe's InDesign package has been generating a lot of heat. Suppliers this year were able to actually show it working, and point to businesses and designers who really used it, a far cry from previous years where screen shots and statements that "we're planning to implement" were the rule.

Keeping the heat up, Adobe scheduled what appeared to be dozens of meetings in the adjacent hotel, with people signing nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) and trooping in to hear the latest and greatest. (I signed so many NDAs I'm probably not allowed to tell anyone my name for the next several years.) Fortunately, though, Adobe's partners on the showroom floor were more than willing to talk in great detail about all the same things. Managing Editor Inc. of Jenkintown, Pa., Adobe's preferred integrator for InScope and InDesign in the magazine industry, was giving better information in its floor demos than was being passed out in the Adobe NDA meetings.

For those who have lost track, a quick recap of Adobe's dance card: InDesign, unveiled to much fanfare at Seybold Boston in 1999; it is the design application touted as the replacement for Quark's venerable XPress. InCopy is the copydesk/editing tool for use with InDesign. InScope is the database that goes under them to track all elements of a product. (InProduction, announced last year as a preflight program on steroids, apparently took an overdose. Adobe pulled that plug shortly before Seybold, apparently conceding the narrow niche of prepress preflight to the plug-in market.)

InDesign, now in version 1.5.2, is being tried out at a number of newspapers and magazines as a replacement for XPress. So far, though, most of those tests are limited to small trials in which a designer or small group uses it as an adjunct to XPress, or just to get their feet wet.

Newspaper suppliers such as Digital Technology International (DTI) of Springville, Utah, and Harris Publishing Systems Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., have installed a handful of systems in recent months that use InDesign as a page-layout application. While DTI has based its entire Version 5 release of its product line on InDesign and InCopy, both Harris and its subsidiary Baseview Products of Ann Arbor, Mich., are offering InDesign as an XPress alternative. Also offering InDesign as a page layout choice are Net-Linx Publishing Solutions of Ann Arbor, Mich., and Sacramento, and Advanced Technology Solutions of Wilmington, Mass. Though DTI and Harris/Baseview exhibited at Seybold Boston, the others did not.

Managing on a browser
Managing Editor was showing a system, based on InDesign and InScope, now in beta at several magazines. The system uses a web browser as the interface to the InScope database, requiring several steps to check things in and out of the database and into InDesign and InCopy.

Although the program works across Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Opera, the Managing Editor team pointed out that the Web interface requires constant screen redraws to display new items and changes and that a browser interface tends to be slow.

Managing Editor's Peter Kelts said that the browser was fine for management tasks, but in the beta tests did not work well for end users. Accordingly, he said, the next round of beta tests will use a standard client to speed things up. For those willing to put up with the current abysmal interface, checking an InDesign page into InScope renders a page as a raster image, compressed in the JPEG format. Since the InScope database is much like a web server, and file names in the Oracle database are web addresses, those Jpegs can be viewed across the Internet for proofing and management purposes.

Managing Editor also announced a new plug-in to tie InCopy and InDesign together, for sites that don't need -- or want to wait for -- InScope. Though the two programs offer parallel functions (InDesign composition and page layout; InCopy composition and text entry), they don't quite share the same file format. InDesign is a full-fledged design tool, probably overkill for the average copy editor. InCopy allows editors to look at a design, but not change it. It also gives the editing tools such as redlining -- much like those available in the minicomputer systems of the '80s -- back to editors, tools not expected to be needed in InDesign.

Unfortunately, something is needed to move a story back and forth as needed, retaining version control. Enter Managing Editor's new TrueEdit plug-in, which uses folders on a server to move things between InDesign and InCopy. It works with the server's software to lock files, allowing a designer to modify a layout while letting a copy editor keep control of the text.

A similar plug-in, Smart Connection, is available from WoodWing Software of The Netherlands, and was being used by several Adobe staffers doing InCopy-InDesign demos. When using Smart Connection, designers don't have access to the story, though they can change its geometry on the page. Stories can be sent individually or in groups to InCopy, and the designers get notified when InCopy has updated versions in return. Ditto for the copy editors, who get updated when a designer changes a page layout affecting their story, updates that can be made with a single button click. Stories sent from InDesign to InCopy cannot be deleted in InDesign, preventing orphaned stories.

A kinder, gentler Quark
Many of the Quark XPress adherents at the show expressed nervousness about the future of the company now that Tim Gill is no longer aboard. They need not have feared. Company co-founder and chief executive Fred Ebrihami, and what appeared to be a cast of thousands, handled various parts of the Quark keynote, unveiling some new products, a new philosophy and a kinder, gentler company.

XPress 5 is going to be based on all open standards, according to Jürgen Kurz, Quark director of operations. "We were proprietary," Kurz said. "You -- our customers -- told us that." Kurz said Quark had abandoned its proprietary roots two years ago, joining the World-Wide Web Consortium. "We now use all standard formats. HTML [HyperText Markup Language], SVG [Scalable Vector Graphics], we use them all," he said.

This use of standard formats allows Quark to drag XPress documents directly onto web pages, keeping the XPress design, Kurz said, allowing companies to skip a step in moving their documents to an intranet or the wider Internet.

Active Publishing Server takes that XPress engine and puts it in a web browser; give those tools to anyone with an Internet connection. Someone using the beta site of Printalis in France (http://www.printalis.com/) can use XPress to design business cards over the 'Net, and have them printed and delivered. Ebrihami said that entire newspaper and magazine workflows could be developed using that toolset.

Also new this year was Quark Media Portal, a web server based on Quark's digital management system, Quark DMS. The portal allows personalized delivery -- to catalogs, web pages or whatever -- of the assets stored in DMS.

Ebrihami, who spent much of his keynote touting the kinder, gentler Quark, said that Quark really likes its users, and wants to make their lives easier. "We are becoming a very open company," he said. "Open technologically and in our hearts. We love publishing. You just look at us. ... We're adding 500 more engineers to serve you. We love serving you."

As to why, in a market saturated with web-development tools and servers, Quark would develop some more, Ebrihami said the answer was easy. "The truth is most people have pages in Quark and then go to the Web. And it's very painful. We make it easy."

Many of these products are keyed to features in XPress 5, which still has not shipped. Announced in February 1999, and originally due to be released that year, it now has a ship date of anywhere from two to 10 months from now, depending on who at Quark is answering. Brett Mueller, the product manager for XPress, said it would ship when it was ready. "If you tested Quark 4.0 you knew it was not ready to ship," Mueller said. "We will never do that again."

It could be up to 10 months before the OS 9 version is ready, Kurz said. He said the OS X version would be ready two to three months later, and warned that it would break all the XTensions, something to please everybody who went through the pain of switching from version 3.x to version 4.

Anywhere, anytime publishing
Not-so-confidential information was everywhere at the show, as Seybold officials adapted their schedules to accommodate the changing economy. Jesse Berst, founder of the AnchorDesk newsletter, was the moderator for the Monday morning keynote, which had originally been scheduled as a Microsoft technology demonstration, replacing it with a session on standards.

"There are two times when it's important to scan the horizon," Berst said. "When times are tough and when things are undergoing rapid change." The current climate fits both of those, he said.

The all-in-one devices touted by futurists have not come to pass. "There hasn't been a convergence," he said, "but in the world of content devices, a divergence. The typical consumer might start with a cell phone, go to work and get on a PC or one of the new smart phones."

Keeping the cost of training and development under control, and making sure you are flexible were important considerations for the panel. "Start with a really rigorous process," Patrick White, founder of Boston-based Sprockets.com, said. "That defines the product management and marketing, and strategies behind what you are going to be building. From there, develop rigorous functional specifications and interface designs."

For those of us in the newspaper business, White suggested keeping an eye on standards, especially those that play into future strategies, pointing to a couple he is keeping an eye on. "One of the standards we are focused on in the future is WebDAV," he said, referring to the World-Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning protocol. "That's a standard that helps you move files between clients and servers -- and especially between servers." Why is that important for newspapers? "The need to move files is a really critical part of any repurposing strategy," he said.

Schild, of Genex Interactive, said that sticking with standards was important. "We do not want to buy or invest in new tools unless there is a significant reason," he said. To keep things under control, "we have invested a lot in Microsoft tools and WebDAV. They are not necessarily the best-of-breed tools, but they do interoperate pretty darn well and we are pretty happy with them."

Several suppliers had glommed onto the Internet as a way to speed up the proofing process, primarily for advertising, but certainly applicable for editorial as well.

Proof-it-online.com of Naples, Fla., for example, uses an ASP model. Subscribers, whether they are publishers or advertisers, have holding bins on the company's servers, according to Rob Munz, Proof-it-online president. "The subscriber logs in [through a browser], navigates to the place on his hard drive where the item resides, and hits the upload button," Munz said.

"When something is posted, the service automatically sends e-mail to the client with the information needed for retrieval." Munz said the client could then open the proof in a browser, approve it, reject it or mark corrections, and notify the agency immediately, cutting out costs for messengers, delivery services and hard copy, and reducing the proofing process to hours instead of days or weeks.

When a proof was approved, the virtual bucket it sat in was emptied and the subscriber could upload a new proof for that client or a different client. Subscribers' clients "don't have to sign up, don't have to join a service or become a member of a proofing cult," Munz said. Though touted for advertising to show proofs to ad agencies and clients, it could easily be used for showing proofs to editors in remote bureaus.

A similar service was shown by RealTimeImage Inc. of San Bruno, Calif., which offers proofing across the Web, as well as several ways to move large proofs rapidly around the Web. Although a bit high-end for daily newspapers, the quality was more than enough to handle glossy supplements or Sunday magazines (for papers that still have one).

Nearly the only downside for print folks this year came in a movie during the Adobe keynote speech -- unveiling the company's vision of network printing, allowing a reader to get the appropriate information in the appropriate language on myriad devices. The premise of the movie was a global merger, and distributing the news worldwide to clients, brokers, analysts and shareholders. The information was available on devices ranging from laptops and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) to cell phones and pagers, and even printed off an Internet-ready printer with the information coming from the infrared port on a cell phone. The perplexed person stumbling around in the dark, trying to find out what was going on? He was the only person shown with a newspaper.

-- Steven E. Brier, seb@colepapers.net

Adobe Systems Inc.,
(408) 536-4281;
Digital Technology International,
(801) 853-5000,
e-mail: dtinfo@dtint.com;
Managing Editor Inc.,
(215) 886-5662,
e-mail: info@maned.com;
Net-Linx Publishing Solutions,
(313) 677-4700,
e-mail: sales@nxps.com;
Proof-it-online.com,
(941) 594-1111,
e-mail: info@proofitonline.com;
Quark Inc.,
(303) 894-8888;
RealTimeImage Inc.,
(650) 616-4670,
e-mail: info@rtimage.com;
Sprockets.com,
(617) 896-2080,
e-mail: info@sprockets.com;
Tera U.S.,
(603) 624-9160,
e-mail: tim@tera-us.com;
WoodWing Software,
{011} (3175) 61 43 400,
e-mail: info@woodwing.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 2001, Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved.