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Trooping the Colour, Spooling the Print:
Computers March publishing from Glum to Glitters
Post Express -
January 30, 1997
Page 21
By
March Oyinki
It
is astonishing to see what information technology hs done to the
typesetting industry. In the past three decades, technological
advancement in the area of typography and composition has
revolutionized the graphic art and prepress industry segments.
Claude Garamond, the sixteenth century French punch cutter who
established the first type foundry probably had little or no idea
what the young industry would become in the ages to come.
Type
is the personality of the printed word. Typography can convey great
individuality. Competent use of type has given structure and
emphasis to text, and helped present it in a way that is comfortable
for the reader. Poor use of type can confuse the reader by conveying
a mood that conflict with the meaning of the text. More especially,
bad use of type can simply be distractive.
The
use of type in composition and graphic design has witnessed
outstanding advancement by the introduction of desktop computing. At
this point, a retrospective overview of the typesetting industry
will allow us to see through the window of history of this noble
industry, and thus enable us to understand even further, the
tremendous advancement this sector has experienced in the last three
decades.
The
story of typesetting over the ages, and in present times across the
country, is really a gloomy and sorry one. The poor economy has
always received the bashing of being responsible for our
shortcomings in the country. This of course is no exception. The
high cost of traditional professional typesetting equipment places
this technology too high beyond the reach of the local printing and
publishing industry. They are left with low budget technology with
relatively low-resolution print output.
High-end typographical output devices far surpass the output
quality of 300dpi or even 600dpi we are used to in this part of the
continent; 2,400dpi is the typesetter’s standard.
In
the early 1970s, the arrival of the electronics selectric composer
was embraced as a cheap alternative to the highly expensive high-end
option. The composer craze swept across the country like a wild
wind, most notably in Lagos, Ibadan and Onitsha.
The
electronic selectric’ composer was not designed for professional
typesetting, and so limits users to a maximum of 12 points type
size. With such paltry features, the composer was still able to make
a significant improvement in the way printers and graphics designers
do their typesetting. The ability of the composer to playback coded
instructions in memory, and produce quality direct impression
typesetting made a great impact. Then it became possible to produce
an error-free formatted final proof of composition. Professional
quality appearance and proportional lettering gives full expression
to each character, excellent letter fit and overall aesthetic
refinement to the type design.
In
the mid 1970s, when electronic composer was still the favourite of
many print and publishing houses, a new era of typography was
emerging. The compugraphic phototypesetting system dominated the
typesetting industry much of the mid 1970s and early 1980s.
Compugraphy provided exceptionally powerful editing and storage
capabilities. It combines the simplicity of a secretarial keyboard
for input, the efficiency of a video display screen for editing, and
the convenience of magnetic disk storage for recording data. Having
an operational speed of 1 ppm (page per minute), and a type size of
between 6 points to 72 points, the compugraphic phototypesetting
machines was placed far ahead of any other typesetting equipment
before its debut.
The
compugraphic machine never lived long enough to see better days. The
exploits of information technology introduced desktop computing. The
personal computer which ws ushered in, in the mid 1980s, had no
difficulty displacing its massive and intimidating predecessor. With
the arrival of PCs, typesetting has continued to grow from strength
to strength.
The
introduction of the PC on the desktop also brought with it, desktop
laser printing, and revolutionized typesetting. The simple emulation
of typewriter output was rapidly replaced by precision comparable to
that of traditional professional typesetting. Initially electronic
font technology was confined to high-end-desktop publishing
software, but ehe popularity and feature richness of software
packages like Ventura Publisher and Aldus PageMaker brought type
technology into the limelight.
Besides
the numerous typefaces that desktop publishing software programs
introduced into page layout and typesetting, graphic design also
feature prominently with packages such as Freehand and CorelDraw.
Desktop publishing allowed the production of camera-ready finished
artworks, thus eliminating the cut-and-paste process.
From
when desktop publishing because popular and today, there had been
tremendous improvement in information technology which is partly
attributed to desktop publishing. For instance resterisation,
which is the process of generating bitmap images for laser printer
output, involves a large amount of data, and is usually the longest
element of the page printing process, is known to be one of the ways
of measuring the standards of computers in the world.
Until
recently laser printers produced images at a maximum resolution of
300dpi both horizontally and vertically, so that one-inch square
matrix took 900,000 dots. At that resolution, an A4 printer needs
around 1 MB of memory to store a single page of uncompressed data.
But the latest printers such as Hewlett-Packard’s LaserJet 4,
based on the Canon LBP-ex engine, deliver resolution of up to
600dpi. This requires four times as much data per square inch, and
so imposes a quadrupled memory overhead.
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