Tedium - Published Via Desktop 📃

Today in Tedium: It’s easy to forget now, but desktop publishing was an immensely innovative thing when it emerged within the computing industry in the early ’80s. While at its heart a mishmash of hardware and software cleverly combined for a single goal, it was an empire builder, one that helped create new businesses and improve the status and positioning of existing ones. And with the decline of print as a medium, it can feel kind of old hat, but lots of stuff still gets typeset every single day. And while we’ve landed on a few standards, a lot of desktop publishing tools failed to make to it the present day. So in a continuation of our list of things that didn’t make it, Today’s Tedium takes a look at 10 early examples of desktop publishing software that you probably don’t remember desktop publishing was a killer app nearly 40 years ago and you were in diapers back then … if you existed at all. (Oh yeah, quick reminder of what makes things obscure, from our point of view.) — Ernie @ Tedium

3. MacPublisher

Platform: MacOS

Era: 1984-1986

Target audience: Professional

Released just before the far-better-known PageMaker, this early tool was one of the first software-based desktop publishing tools for the Mac, being released a year before PageMaker and anticipating the interest in such a technology on the market. While nowhere near as polished as many later tools, it nonetheless pointed the direction in which the Mac software market would go.

The man who developed this groundbreaking tool, Bob Doyle, is arguably as notable as the desktop publishing software he developed. An astrophysicist-turned-inventor, he had a bit of a track record for being ahead of the curve on things, based on his Information Philosopher website. Even before signing up to become a MacOS developer, the onetime NASA employee had helped to develop a successful business around a tool that added sound to Super 8 film, then was responsible for developing the popular electronic handheld game Merlin, then developed a miniature terminal. He later went on to build a reputation as a digital video expert and took part in developing some of the earliest podcasts.

Yet this man doesn’t have a Wikipedia page.

(via WinWorldPC)

6. Clickart Personal Publisher

Platform: DOS, Windows

Era: 1986-2002

Target audience: Prosumer

This application lived a lot of lives under a lot of names, but the very first of those names was Clickart Personal Publisher. As WinWorldPC notes, the software was later resold under the names PFS:First Publisher and Easy Working Desktop Publisher.

As implied by the numerous rebrands, the software wasn’t exactly successful, but it did draw attention for being one of the first PC-centric applications built for desktop publishing.

As an InfoWorld review noted:

For $185, Clickart Personal Publisher gives you the tools to enhance text and electronically paste graphics in a screen environment that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Macintosh. You see your document on your color or Hercules-compatible system exactly as it will be printed on a dot-matrix printer, or with optional additional software, on a laser printer.

This may not be the first publishing system on the IBM PC, but it’s the first true page layout program in this price range. We were impressed and surprised. It’s sold as a modest newsletter maker, eats up memory and processing power with a hearty appetite, and is clearly intended for light-duty work, but it does an amazingly good job on many levels.

(One downside, the InfoWorld review notes, is that the driver for laser printers, a key element of desktop publishing in its day, is sold separately.)

9. Timeworks Publisher

Platform: IBM PC, Atari TOS, GEM, Microsoft Windows, Acorn Archimedes, MacOS, Apple II

Era: 1987-2009

Target audience: Prosumer

Released soon after Ventura Publisher and priced significantly less, this early entrant into the PC world also crossed the streams more aggressively than some other platforms, appearing on Atari- and Acorn-based machines. It did have a Mac version—even if, like Ventura, its claim to fame was that it was a good option for people who didn’t own Macs. (Like Ventura, however, it was originally built to work with the GEM interface.)

This application was sold under a variety of names, with the most common ones beyond Timeworks Publisher being Publish-It!, DESKpress, and KeyPublisher. (One has to wonder, given the importance of cross-compatibility in the publishing sector, if this complex naming situation ended up harming it in the market.)

The magazine ST-Log, focused on Atari machines, pointed at Timeworks’ struggles with kerning (or adjusting the spacing between text) as a reason why it was not truly a professional-grade program:

Kerning—minute adjustments between letters—is another issue where the Publisher is inferior to Ventura. You can kern individual letters but there is no provision for automatic document or paragraph kerning. Even had they simply provided automatic kerning for the 20 most commonly kerned pairs, it would have vastly improved the program. Lack of kerning is most noticeable in Postscript and typesetter output, where fonts carry correct kerning information in their data file. A quick glance through the Publisher’s manual shows that they did not use their own program to create it, because the manual is properly kerned throughout.

This, unfortunately, also drags the Publisher’s output down below the requirements of professional publishing, since no one is likely to engage in the Herculean task of manually kerning a 300-page document, much less a single chapter. And, simply put, professional documents demand kerning.

As any graphic designer will tell you, kerning separates the pretenders from the real deal.