desktop publishing (DTP)

Traditionally documents such as advertisements, brochures, and reports were prepared by combining typed or printed text with pasted-in illustrations (such as photographs and diagrams). This painstaking layout process was necessary in order to produce “camera-ready copy” from which a printing company could produce the final product.

Starting in the late 1980s, desktop computers became powerful enough to run software that could be used to cre-ate page layouts. In addition, display hardware gained a high enough resolution to allow for pages to be shown on the screen in much the same form as they would appear on the printed page. (This is known by the acronym WYSI-WYG, or “what you see is what you get.”) The final ingredi-ent for the creation of desktop publishing was the advent of affordable laser or inkjet printers that could print near print quality text and high-resolution graphics (see printers).

This combination of technologies made it feasible for trained office personnel to create, design, and produce many documents in-house rather than having to send copy to a printing company. Adobe’s PageMaker program soon became a standard for the desktop publishing industry, appearing first on the Apple Macintosh and later on systems running Micro-soft Windows. (The Macintosh’s support for fonts and WYSI-WYG displays gave it a head start over the Windows PC in the DTP industry, and to this day many professionals prefer it.)

There is no hard-and-fast line between desktop publish-ing and the creation of text itself. Modern word processing software such as Microsoft Word includes a variety of features for selection and sizing of fonts, and the ability to define styles for creating headings, types of paragraphs, and so on (see word processing). Word and other programs also allow for the insertion and placement of graphics and tables, the division of text into columns, and other layout features. In general, however, word processing emphasizes the creation of text (often for long documents), while desktop publishing software emphasizes layout considerations and the fine-tun-ing of a document’s appearance. Thus, while a word proces-sor might allow the selection of a font in a given point size, a desktop publishing program allows for the exact specification of leading (space between lines) and kerning (the adjustment of space between characters). Most desktop publishing pro-grams can import text that was originally created in a word processor. This is helpful because using desktop publishing software to create the original text can be tedious.

Desktop publishing is generally used for short docu-ments such as ads, brochures, and reports. Material to be published as a book or magazine article is normally submit-ted by the author as a word processing document. The pub-lisher’s production staff then creates a print-ready version. Books and other long documents are generally produced using in-house computer typesetting facilities.

Today desktop publishing is part of a range of technolo-gies used for the production of documents and presenta-tions. Document designers also use drawing programs (such as Corel Draw) and photo manipulation programs (such as Adobe Photoshop) in preparing illustrations. Further, the growing use of the Web means that many documents must be displayable on Web pages as well as in print. Adobe’s Por-table Document Format (PDF) is one popular way of creat-ing files that exactly portray printed text (see PDF).