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But before looking at the Internet, let us examine what is happening to the good old print medium. The great breakthrough for the printing technology was the development of high speed steam printing press in 1830. A hundred years later, the rotary press emerged making mass production of newspapers possible. There had been many refinements and additions to the technology such as offset printing. In fact, most of the important developments before the arrival of computers were around the printing press. The quality and speed of printing improved tremendously in the latter half of the twentieth century. Printing presses became very sophisticated, and the level of automation increased. If two persons were needed earlier to load each page, cast in lead, onto the rotary press, now plates are loaded automatically on the web offset press. Technologies also emerged for high quality colour separation and four colour printing. The rotary press started giving way to the web offset presses as back us in the seventies. And for the last two decades, nothing dramatic seems to be happening in this area. However, the electronic sophistry of printing presses is increasing. The number of copies that can be printed on a web offset press has been gradually going up, surpassing earlier limits set by the rotary. The latest presses are computer controlled and custom settings can automatically be made through computers. They can also be operated remotely. This has reduced the number of people needed to operate the presses. The units of the latest presses are arranged vertically, reducing the need for long horizontal spaces.
The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of transmission of newspaper pages by fax and the inauguration of photocomposing. The Japanese had started using facsimile transmission of the newspaper pages early in the fifties. THE HINDU was the first newspaper to introduce facsimile editions in India. Some newspapers like Malayala Manorama adopted this technology several years later. Others altogether skipped this phase of technology and jumped to computer based transmission of pages in the nineties.
Prior to these developments, monotype had given way to Linotype in larger newspapers. Hot metal composition, which was common in the seventies, was tedious and time consuming. The average output on a Linotype machine was about 200 (newspaper column) lines per hour. There was an inherent restriction on the speed of the operator as molten lead is cast into lines.
Photocomposing, which arrived in the seventies, removed the tedium of the operator to a large extent and restrictions on his speed. The early photocomposing units installed by THE HINDU could compose 1000 lines per minute. Now, nobody talks of speed in composing. The only speeds worth considering now are the speed of the operator and the speed of transferring the made up page on to film (which is just a few minutes). Whole newspaper pages can now be sent across continents in a matter of minutes. This is being facilitated by high speed modems, fiber optic cables and satellite links. The last page being readied for an edition— that is, the front page carrying the late breaking news, can reach the press from the pagination room in less than ten minutes. The latest web offset printing presses for newspapers can print at the rate of about one lakh copies per hour.
While the high end technologies for printing became more complex, a new dimension to publishing was added by the personal computer. The computer made it possible to publish material from the desktop. Thus, publication of a lot of new material became feasible. Now, one can publish small booklets or magazines without worrying about the costs and large scale circulation. The page making can now be done even from your home. Thus, you can publish something with small investments. The whole equipment would cost you only a few lakh rupees, and the power of publishing is in your hands. (You have to use the services of an outside printing press, if you want a good number of copies).
The distinguishing feature of this technology is that it can bring about quality very closer to those achieved by larger presses. Almost all the typesetting features and tools needed to bring out well designed publications are available in latest DTP programs for the personal computer. They can handle graphics and pictures with ease.
Accompanying programs like PhotoShop can enhance the quality of your photographs. And programs like CorelDRAW offer unlimited graphic and design opportunities. Type alignment has become so easy that you take it for granted. (Once, this was being done manually!)
As I said earlier, the low end and high end technologies in typesetting and page make up are now closer than a decade ago. A small as well as large publication would need only personal computers to make the page. Definitely, the latter would need more of them, organized into a local area network or intranet, with much more disk space and other resources. On the software side, the features available on the Champion system used by THE HINDU and the PageMaker used by a local desktop publisher in Thiruvananthapuram are not much different. What the local man lacks is the Linotronic printer that can transfer the made up page on to photographic film for plate making. This situation may also change if service providers with Linotronic printers get established as in the West. In future, it would be possible for the desktop publisher to hand over floppy disks containing his pages to the presses which will have Linotronic printers.
The entry of computers into typesetting was not without any casualties. The computers almost displaced a band of traditional typesetters, impositors and lay out artists who rightly prided in their work. They were men who practised type setting and layout as an art, strictly adhering to rules of their profession. The computer operators who replaced them were adept in handling the machine and the programs, but lacked knowledge about niceties of typesetting. As there was a divide between the old and the new generation, the fine art of typesetting was not passed on to the new generation by the old guard in full. Though most of the old typesetters were trained in the use of computers in several organisations so as to avoid retrenchments, most of them never acquired full mastery of the new medium.
Many were just using the computer in a mechanical manner and looking forward to their retirement. As a result of this, now one finds the new comers breaking rules, that were considered sacrosanct by the old guard, with impunity. Some of them have not even heard of things like grid alignment. Many of them manipulate line spacing without discipline and entirely leave spacing between words and justification to the machine. Though the typesetters now have the added power to manipulate features like kerning, many of today's typesetters do not have the skill or inclination to try them.
Scalable fonts available on computers have opened up possibilities that the old generation of typesetters could never dream of. The freedom of the old compositors to choose point sizes was limited by the choices available in their composing room. Now, the computers will create any point size for you. And a large number of fonts are available as never before. The machine, however, had brought in certain limitations on page design. With some of the early software, there were difficulties in achieving text flow into L-shaped or T-shaped designs. Defining of rectangular design elements, on the other hand, was easy. Thus, L-shaped and T-shaped text lay out became rare in newspapers using computer typesetting and rectangular blocks dominated. The new techniques also led to newspapers gradually abandoning vertical and horizontal page make up in favour of modular design. The transition was often through designs that were neither this nor that.
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