Even with increasing automation at major
newspapers, design and layout software continues to touch the majority of files
on a daily basis.
Smaller newspapers depend on the packages even
more heavily. Advertising production departments will typically use applications
like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, or MultiAdCreator from MultiAd Inc. to
ultimately generate EPS or PDF files. From there, those files are placed in a
master QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign document, whether full-resolution or
lower-resolution proxies. In the case of low-res files, those are typically
replaced before going to the raster image processors with an open prepress
interface system.
Increasingly, a layout application is also asked
to provide another function: exporting eXtensible Markup Language or text files
to an Internet front-end or a content management system that, in turn, feeds a
Web publishing system. In this case, the low-res (72-96 dots per inch) proxy
files could be used for actual output.
Adobe InDesign 2.0
With InDesign 2.0, Adobe continues the attempt to
penetrate into a market that had previously been largely owned by Quark. The
company is emphasizing the ability of Adobe products to work together as a
suite. For instance, a PSD file generated by Photoshop can be placed directly in
an InDesign document, as can a PDF file. This ability to integrate extends to
the new Adobe InCopy 2.0 as well.
“It really maps to a lot of workflows that
newspaper publishing is familiar with,” said Maria Yap, senior product manager
for InDesign. “(It offers) the ability to have editors and writers write their
stories and the layout artists do the layout in a parallel fashion so (that) you
can merge the two together.”
Yap
feels the overall integration of InDesign is one of the application’s
strongest features.
“People really enjoy the fact that you can
place native Photoshop and Illustrator files. The keyboard shortcuts are very
similar so there’s not a lot of retraining or retooling going on. The direct
support for PDF right from InDesign is another key feature … we take advantage
of our core technology so that the user can place a Photoshop file and see the
transparency through to the background color in an InDesign document.”
InDesign has XML-handling ability, both import
and export. When exporting, tag names are determined and applied to graphics
frames, text frames and blocks of text. When importing XML files, the user can
specify whether imported elements replace existing elements or are appended.
Even before the release of 2.0, The Miami Herald
(daily, 327,105; Sunday, 443,752) was starting to plan the early stages of a
switch from Quark to InDesign. Systems Editor Jason Zappe said the process was
intense, as it’s difficult to replace software that’s used in a daily
production environment.
“The main push for InDesign is one, where Adobe
is and what products we use on a daily basis, and also that net-linx’s new
product which we’re beta testing, called Insight, uses InDesign as the
pagination engine.”
For the paper, PDF usability was a big factor in
the transition since the workflow is PDF-based. According to Zappe, The Knight
Ridder ownership is making efforts to standardize technology as much as possible
across its properties as well.
“Under the direction of Steve Hannah (vice
president of technology for Knight Ridder), the company has created task forces
for each area such as production, editorial, publishing, circulation and
advertising. These task forces then go out and go through a selection process to
pick vendors that will be used in all the Knight Ridder properties.”
Adobe does not release sales figures for
individual products. In a June 26 article in Investor’s Business Daily, Adobe
Chief Executive Officer Bruce Chizen stated that the goal for the company was
50-percent market share for new units sold in the U.S. by the fourth quarter of
2002.
He said in the four-month period between January
and April, it had a 52 percent share of new units. Chizen was confident even
with the mid-year slump in software sales, Adobe would reach its stated goal for
InDesign by the end of the year.
Quark 5.0
Denver-based Quark Inc. is competing with
Adobe with its latest release of QuarkXPress version 5.0 and the Quark Digital
Media System. The company has acknowledged in the past the somewhat glitchy
nature of the 4.0 family of releases, particularly the lower-numbered versions.
Version 5.0 is reported to exhibit much greater internal stability along with
the new features.
Some of the most significant features in 5.0 are
Internet related. Quark introduced the Web document, which is a new format that
allows the publishing of Web content. Think of it not as a full-fledged Web
publishing “solution,” but rather as an equivalent to an application like
Microsoft FrontPage, or a lightweight Macromedia Dreamweaver without the live
database interface capabilities. With these Web features, Quark claims that the
same designer who is doing print-based layout can now transition smoothly to
doing Web-based layout.
To turn a QuarkXPress document into a Web
document, it gets exported as a HyperText Markup Language file along with
accompanying picture and media files. Those pictures are converted to either
JPEGs, GIFs or PNGs depending on the output settings.
When a project is finished, 5.0 offers a more
sophisticated Collect for Output feature. In addition to copying the document,
imported pictures and output report into one folder, it can copy fonts and ICC
color profiles into the collection folder as well.
For XML output, Quark provides avenue.quark,
which was previously sold as a separate product. With avenue.quark, content
extraction can be automated by setting up an HTML template with QuarkXPress 5.0.
üo compete with the WebDAV-enabled InDesign,
Quark offers DMS, which integrates onscreen with applications like QuarkXPress
and Photoshop. This functions as a full-featured content management system,
capable of handling file extensions such as TIFF, EPS, PDF, BMP, HTML and many
others. New file types can also be added as they are created by new
applications. QuarkDMS supports OPI from vendors such as Helios, IPT and Xinet.
On the hardware level, QuarkDMS is written in the
native Oracle 8 interface, and runs on both NT and Unix servers.
Quark declined a request to provide sales figures
on QuarkXPress 5.0.
At deadline, Quark announced that in response to
customer feedback, it plans to re-launch its ServicePlus customer care program.
The program, which was scheduled to go into effect at the end of October, will
make it easier for publishing businesses to plan and budget their QuarkXPress
software expenses, according to Quark.
MultiAd Creator 6.5
The Creator family of products varies from the
offerings of Adobe and Quark in that it’s specifically targeted to the
newspaper market. InDesign and QuarkXPress are used widely in advertising and
corporate art departments. Creator, on the other hand, is designed for use in
high-volume newspaper ad-production environments.
The first generation of Creator from MultiAd was
released in 1989, initially on the Apple Macintosh platform only. Today’s
version, 6.5, is available on Microsoft Windows as well and was released in June
2002 to coincide with Nexpo in Orlando, Fla.
Features like “Make Matrix” are unique to
Creator. This lets the user quickly duplicate any selected element, or groups of
elements in a so-called array, by rows and columns. The user specifies the size,
location and spacing between the elements. This type of feature is typically
used to design repetitive box-type layouts, like a 4-by-4 grid of coupons. The
user can quickly create one box, duplicate it, and just fill in the text.
Starbursts are also used frequently in newspaper advertising for price specials,
so Creator has a tool dedicated to cranking them out quickly.
Version 6.5 includes a built-in PostScript
interpreter, to rasterize PostScript files to non-PostScript devices like inkjet
printers, or on the display screen. This allows the true display of the image
and not a 72-dpi preview. Text can now be placed on a path. A magic wand tool is
provided for advanced graphic masking. XML-export is now supported, and on the
input side, PDF files can be placed directly in a document.
The latest addition to the Creator family of
products is Creator Server. The Server is effectively a multi-threaded
document-building “engine” designed for high-volume production. More than
anything, this software resembles Adobe Graphics Server in its purpose, which is
to do element replacements (based on templates) in a totally automated, scripted
environment.
XML is the input/output language of choice, both
as storage within the application and as an input-output query mechanism. To
control the server, developers use Creator Server Command Language to perform
commands like “open document,” “move element,” etc.
The server runs in multiple environments such as
Linux, Unix, Windows 2000 and XP, and Macintosh OS X.
MultiAd also declined requests to provide sales
figures for their software.
Although all these solutions are available as
strictly desktop-based products, we can see that there is an evolution taking
place. All of them have some element of a “server” available. This makes
them both stand-alone products if low volumes are purchased, and part of a
larger production environment that is more workflow-based if high volumes are
purchased and integrated. This serves the purpose of making single-copy sales
immediately useful while reserving the potential for more complex integrations
in the future.
