A brief history of DTP

Tom Arah Read more October 7, 2009

The accepted wisdom is that DTP (desktop publishing) was invented by Steve Jobs with the launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, but this is wrong on at least two counts. To begin with, while Mac’s GUI (graphical user interface) permitted bitmapped fonts, pictures and layouts to be viewed on both screen and printer – a world away from character-based PC clones – these twin concepts of WIMP (Windows Icon Menus Pointers) and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) had in fact been pioneered years earlier, most notably by Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse, and by Xerox researchers working on the Alto and Star systems at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s. Jobs’ genius was to take the ideas mainstream by creating an affordable, user-friendly PC.

More importantly, at its launch, the Mac was by no means a platform for serious DTP. Sure, you could mix graphics and text and see different fonts onscreen, but in just nine bitmapped fonts, six different point sizes and five styles (including those typographical atrocities “outline” and “shadow”). And with output limited to the 72dpi dot matrix ImageWriter printer, it was hard to imagine the first Macs revolutionising the publishing industry – a PC connected to a daisywheel produced far more professional output! What transformed the Mac from an expensive executive toy into a publishing powerhouse was the launch of Adobe’s PostScript in 1985. Created by two ex-PARC programmers, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, PostScript was a page description language that described the layout of each page and the fonts to use programmatically in terms of vectors. This meant that any application on any platform could output a PostScript print file that would print the same way on any supported device: true platform, software, device and resolution independence.

However, PostScript was demanding and was originally intended to run on expensive, dedicated hardware such as the Linotronic 100 and 300 imagesetters – the original Mac just wasn’t up to the job. Fatefully, over a health food breakfast, Jobs persuaded Geschke and Warnock to license the technology to Apple as the controller for its new laser printer (another device invented at Xerox PARC). The result was the LaserWriter, launched in 1985 with its 12MHz CPU, 512KB of RAM and 1MB frame-buffer – a far more powerful computer than the Mac itself and, arguably, more significant too. The Apple LaserWriter took PostScript into the mainstream and made professional DTP possible by offering three huge advances: scalable fonts that could be used at any size; 300dpi resolution local output that was good enough for low volume, low budget work; and, most important, the ability to output exactly the same layout for proofing at 300dpi, then to image-set it at, say, 1,250dpi or 2,540dpi for commercial printing.

All that remained was for some new application to unleash PostScript’s potential. That arrived in 1985 too, from the tiny Aldus Corporation whose owner Paul Brainerd came from a newspaper background and thus grasped the potential of “desktop publishing” (the phrase he coined to describe computerised layout and setting). The original Aldus business plan was for an expensive newspaper production system costing $500,000, and it was Jobs again who evangelised the potential of what he called “democratic publishing” and persuaded Brainerd to broaden the appeal of his PageMaker application by lowering the price – Brainerd eventually compromised on $495 rather than the $99 that Jobs was pitching for.
Aldus PageMaker was the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle, and just in time too, because without any “killer application” the Mac faced market extinction. With the Mac-based PageMaker outputting to PostScript-based LaserWriters and Linotronics, the advantages of DTP became so compelling that it sparked a revolution. Before DTP, to produce, say, a newsletter, you’d need a skilled compositor to key in the text and formatting codes on an expensive typesetting system that output long strips or galleys of formatted text. These would then be cut into blocks with a scalpel and pasted onto layout grids, along with the pictures that had to be resized and screened with a special process camera. With PageMaker, you took word-processed text and scanned images and recreated this manual paste-up process on the screen, interactively dragging and resizing blocks of text and graphics with the mouse. It was easier, more efficient, more flexible, more creative – and much cheaper.

Thanks to Pagemaker, DTP became strongly associated with the Mac, but in fact PostScript’s platform independence meant that any other GUI-based system, such as the Atari or Amiga, was equally capable. The real prize was the volume market of IBM PC users and, in late 1985, Microsoft provided a potential DTP platform by grafting its graphical Windows interface over the top of its character-based MS-DOS. Versions 1 and 2 looked pitiful and the experiment seemed doomed, but fatefully Aldus chose an embedded version of Windows as the platform to port PageMaker to the PC in 1987. That one major application gave Windows the impetus it needed to survive and eventually conquer the world. So, having already saved the Mac, now PageMaker saved Windows.

However, at the time, there were alternative GUIs for the PC, the most successful being GEM (Graphics Environment Manager) – designed by more PARC alumni, led by Lee Jay Lorenzen. In 1986, Lorenzen joined Don Heiskel and the visionary John Meyer to create Ventura Publisher, a rival to PageMaker that ran on an embedded version of GEM. In 1987, PageMaker faced competition on the Mac itself from Tim Gill’s QuarkXPress, and by the late 1980s all three of the pioneering DTP giants were fighting for dominance.

So which one was the most powerful? Surprisingly, the answer has to be the least-known – Ventura Publisher – and by quite some way. Where PageMaker employed freeform text blocks, Ventura was built around “frames” – one for the underlying page into which text flowed automatically, and more for overlaying and embedding text and graphics. More powerful still was its separation of style from content, using tagged text files and a stylesheet that came together to produce the final layout, enabling extraordinary publishing efficiency. Back in the late 1980s, I could take a dBase II print output file, run it through the character-based word processor PC Write to automatically add tabs, tags and box characters, then simply load it into Ventura as ready-formatted, multipage, vertically justified, tabulated, ready-to-print pricelists. Doing the same with either of today’s market leaders would be a nightmare.

Unfortunately, Ventura Publisher was too far ahead of its time – nowadays, XML and CSS fully exploit the benefit of separating style from content, but back then many people found it more trouble than it was worth, making file housekeeping and formatting unnecessarily complex. Having to create a new tag to apply to a single paragraph was particularly irksome. The real problem, though, was Ventura’s reliance on GEM, which Xerox recognised when it took over development in 1990 and rewrote version 3 for Windows, Mac and OS/2. Initial interest was feverish, but the code was buggy and offered little immediate benefit to entice existing users away from GEM, so sales collapsed, never to fully recover. In late 1993, Corel (originally a Ventura solutions provider) bought the program, but Ventura’s market share continued to fall. The latest release of Corel Ventura Publisher 10 shipped in 2002 and still offers extraordinary power, but further releases look doubtful.
As Ventura floundered, PageMaker cleaned up the PC market, and as the only cross-platform DTP application its sales boomed from $12 million in Aldus’ first year of operation to $100 million by the fifth. However, although PageMaker’s interactive, page-based approach was attractively simple and intuitive, it was poorly suited for high-end periodical publishing where efficiency was the overriding goal. It wasn’t just the underlying metaphor that was wrong: the code itself proved difficult to update. By 1993, the company was posting quarterly losses; in 1994, Brainerd sold out to Adobe, giving Adobe a foothold in the world of DTP application software and PageMaker a new lease of life. However, the writing was still on the wall and, after an unhappy attempt to graft on frame-based handling, Adobe PageMaker was forced to reposition itself for the occasional office user rather than the professional designer. The last release was 2001’s version 7.

Against all the odds, the winner of this first DTP war turned out to be the expensive, Mac-only late arrival QuarkXPress. Oddly enough these apparent drawbacks proved to be its greatest strengths. PostScript was theoretically platform-independent, but sending a PostScript file to an imagesetter was like working half blind – it was much easier and safer to print from the application itself, and all output bureaux ran on Macs. Moreover, for the high-end publishers, Quark’s high price was reassuring – they simply didn’t want their multimillion-pound businesses running on $99 (or even $495) software. And by entering the market comparatively late, QuarkXPress was in a position to borrow from both Ventura and PageMaker and combine reasonably efficient frame-based layouts with a sufficient level of interactive flexibility – the perfect compromise for publications working to a deadline, like this magazine.

What ultimately led Quark to victory, though, was sheer luck: by the time it finally got round to producing the by-now essential Windows version, 3.1, in 1992, both Ventura and PageMaker had run into the buffers, and QuarkXPress was left as the only serious high-end cross-platform DTP application. It came to dominate its sector in the same way Adobe Photoshop did in photo editing. Success breeds success and Quark skills became a must-have for any aspiring designer, thus cementing Quark’s dominance. With no real competition, Quark didn’t need to do anything serious to maintain its position – and nothing is pretty much what the company did, milking Quark 3 via minor and expensive point releases for five whole years before 1997’s version 4.

By comparison, Adobe was going through a difficult period. The advent of scalable TrueType font handling built into both Mac OS and Windows removed the biggest selling point from PostScript – licensing revenues fell, and Adobe’s 1993 attempt to reinvent the technology as PDF (Portable Document Format), a universal exchange format and centerpiece of the paperless office, failed to take off as expected. To continue benefiting from PostScript, the company desperately needed a professional DTP application, but after buying up both PageMaker and the frame-based technical documentation package FrameMaker it found neither a suitable base for further development.

Quark was essentially creaming off all the PostScript-based earnings that rightfully belonged to Adobe, and in 1997 it rubbed salt in the wounds by launching a surprise bid for its rival. Quark presented this move as a way of merging the market-leading DTP application with its natural partners, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat, which certainly made a lot of sense on paper. The big surprise was the anger with which the design community rejected the merger – enough was enough, Quark had exploited its DTP monopoly for too long, and no-one wanted it doing the same across the whole professional designer’s toolkit. In any case, it turned out that Quark’s bid wasn’t quite so public-spirited as it appeared, and that its main rationale was self-interest – Quark wanted to ensure that Adobe divested itself not only of PageMaker but of its secret “K2” project.
K2 was the codename for an entirely new DTP application begun by Aldus once the company realised that PageMaker had no long-term future, and that new code was required if QuarkXPress was to meet its match. As such, expectations were extraordinarily high when two years later in August 1999 Adobe’s “Quark-killer” InDesign finally shipped… and so the disappointment was equally keen. Certainly, InDesign 1 offered some impressive new features, such as built-in PDF export, multiline composing and optical kerning, and advanced frame-based flow control complete with the ability to nest frames within one another. However, other desired features such as table editing, footnote handling, multichapter books, text-on-a-path and many more were all missing. Most disappointing of all, for a supposedly next-generation DTP application, InDesign looked and felt distinctly old-fashioned and strongly reminiscent of PageMaker.

After the “Quark-killer” hype subsided, very few users were tempted to jump ship by InDesign’s first release, nor by the 1.5 follow-up in early 2001. It looked as if it might go the way of PageMaker and Ventura, but, in January 2002, InDesign 2 was launched and it was a revelation – alongside true cell-based table editing, book handling and XML import and export, InDesign broke entirely new ground by adding support for transparency. Crucially, this transparency didn’t rely on rasterizing down to bitmaps but was PostScript based, so that wherever possible objects were kept as vectors to ensure pin-sharp image-set output.

Support for vector-based transparency and soft-edged alpha channels in imported Photoshop PSD images enabled InDesign users to produce more attractive work, which is what a designer’s job is all about. Quark had to respond and it did so within days by releasing QuarkXPress 5 – which was truly dreadful. All it offered in terms of new print power was a belated, and underpowered, ability to handle layers and grid-based tables, the rest of the release focusing on sub-shareware-quality web design tools – an extraordinary misjudgment. 2003’s version 6 was little better, compounding the problems by introducing a new file format capable of holding multiple print and web layouts, all unnecessary complication and wasted effort (has anyone ever seen a web publication produced directly from QuarkXPress?)

The trickle of Quark users jumping ship became a flood and InDesign began outselling QuarkXPress. It seemed as though the second DTP war had been decisively won, with Quark effectively ceding the commercial print high ground, especially once Adobe began to exploit its design expertise by bundling InDesign with Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat into the Creative Suite. It began to look inevitable that QuarkXPress would go the way of Ventura and PageMaker, but surprisingly that hasn’t happened.

Quark’s continued survival was originally due to the sheer inertia of large publishing institutions reluctant to change their established workflows, but this only provided a period of grace. To have a long-term future, Quark needed to change radically, and that’s exactly what it’s done. The first sign came with 2004’s XPress 6.5, which, with its built-in picture retouching effects, finally added a new print-oriented design feature that all users would benefit from (and, better still, which InDesign lacked). Moreover, the upgrade was free for Quark’s long-suffering users. More significant still was the recent launch of version 7, which was everything that most users had once hoped for: in particular, it finally saw QuarkXPress catch up with InDesign in terms of core transparency support, so that the rivals are competing again on a level playing field in terms of end result. New features such as the ability for multiple users to work on the same project simultaneously, and a more streamlined interface that shows up InDesign’s palette-based bloat, even allow QuarkXPress 7 to claim that it’s now a more productive working environment, especially for the core market of regular publishing workgroups.
With Quark successfully refocused both on high-end print and its customers’ needs, there’s even a chance that future releases will again pull ahead of InDesign. After all, Quark has now realised that its survival depends entirely on providing the most productive professional DTP application, while Adobe has other battles to fight to absorb its recently acquired web-based Macromedia applications while parrying imminent Expression and XPS-based attacks from Microsoft. For the moment, the DTP crown rests with InDesign, which is perhaps fitting considering the roles Adobe and Aldus played in the birth of DTP, but I can’t help but feel there are more twists and turns ahead.