Hassle-free pagination based on desktop publishing would be heaven, but we're going through hell to get it
A software salesman dies and heads up to the pearly gates. When he gets there he finds a bored St. Peter reading a newspaper. The salesman waits for a while, then coughs politely. Without looking up, St. Peter says, "Heaven on your left, hell on your right."
"I'm sorry?" asks the salesman.
"Heaven on your left, hell on your right. Look through the windows, pick the one you want and stop bothering me."
So the salesman looks through the window of the door leading to heaven. He sees a bunch of angels playing harps and floating around on clouds. "Pretty boring," he mutters as he walks to the other door. There, he sees a hip band blowing hot jazz and lots of chic, sexy people drinking heavily and undulating to the music.
"Hell is where it's happening," he thinks as he walks through the door--only to be set upon by a band of demons with pitchforks who drive him straight into a pit of boiling lava! As he starts to scream, he sees Satan approach.
"Satan! Where's the party I saw through the window?" cries the software salesman.
"The party?" asks Satan. Oh yea, the party. That was our demo!"
Unfortunately, a number of poor souls in our industry can relate to that joke--those who've tried to implement pagination systems based on desktop publishing. Some believe that the demos they based their purchases on didn't even hint at the pain that would be involved in implementing the actual systems.
Among those who feel burned is a system editor from New England, who asked to remain anonymous. He has a very blunt explanation for why desktop pagination is proving so difficult at so many papers: "Maybe it's because the integrators lied."
Maybe, however, the problem is even more fundamental. Maybe the road to desktop pagination is simply the wrong road.
"We use QuarkXpress for some pages, but Quark is not the solution," says Mike Spain, assistant managing editor for systems at The Times Union in Albany, N.Y. "It has a role, but when it comes down to paginating on deadline, with many people handling the various page components, Quark just doesn't do it. It is not a true front-end system."
Adds Tim Hawkins, a publishing-systems consultant with London, England-based Newspaper Publishing Systems, "Perhaps somebody needs to go back to first principles and build a generation of systems that do not have 20 years of compromise rolled into them."
In the beginning there was the backshop, where people with razor blades turned galley type into a newspaper, and it was good--but very expensive. So newspaper vendors introduced proprietary pagination systems that could lay out entire pages, cutting labor costs--but those systems were also very expensive.
Meanwhile, a convergence of new technologies started the desktop-publishing revolution. PCs capable of high-quality graphics, laser printers and the Adobe PostScript page-description language made it possible.
The new technology gave designers new freedom. If you wanted to lay out a photo diagonally, you could just grab and rotate it. If it looked horrible, you could simply hit "undo."
Designers began demanding--and getting--Macintoshes equipped with QuarkXpress and Adobe Photoshop. The new equipment often allowed spectacular improvements in newspaper design. (It also allowed some truly hideous stuff--no one has yet written a program that can arbitrate good taste.)
The people paying the bills also noticed something: The new equipment cost a lot less than the proprietary stuff. Publishers tired of waiting six months and coughing up five figures for a simple font change were drawn to alternatives such as Adobe Type On Call, which allowed the same change to be made with a phone call and $100.
Another draw was WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), the principle upon which the new technology is based. Almost everyone loves seeing the actual page while they're building it instead of guessing how their reams of code will turn out.
The trend continues. Almost every pagination vendor at NEXPO®'95 prominently displayed boxes of QuarkXpress or Adobe PageMaker. Dewar Information Systems Corp., whose DewarView software is based on Quark, was purchased by the parent of traditional-system vendor Atex Publishing Systems Corp. (see story, Sysdeco Acquires Two U.S. Vendors). Computer maker Digital Equipment Corp., which used to sell its mainframe-based Text Management System to newspapers, now resells DewarView and Quark Publishing System. Even System Integrators Inc. has been stressing its ability to link with QuarkXpress.
Buying this new technology is based on the same WYSIWYG principle. Unfortunately, the inverse has also proven true: What You Don't See Is What You Don't Get.
That's the part we're all paying for now.
The proprietary systems centered around Big Iron--mainframes or minicomputers. Such systems use a single central computer system accessed through dumb terminals. The terminals, spread all over your newsroom, are actually nothing more than devices that allow you to communicate with the real computer out back. Since everything is on the central system and can't be anywhere else, system management becomes a question of managing that one system. Think of it as managing a single big building.
Microcomputer networks, on the other hand, link machines that are all capable of acting independently. Think of it as managing an entire city.
So while a story or a page on a Big Iron system can only be in the central system, it can be anywhere on a network--and often is. It can be on the server, on someone's hard drive, or even on a Syquest cartridge or a floppy disk. Worse, while Big Iron management tools are fairly mature, network tools are just starting to emerge from those awkward adolescent years.
Says Susan Carter, network administrator and production director at the Cleveland (Tenn.) Daily Banner, "Work flow has been an area of total chaos. After six months, we have finally implemented deadlines that are working."
While the system people wrestled with the joys of networking, the layout folks learned the undiscovered joys of 'Xpress or PageMaker. The great thing about these programs is that you can adjust just about everything. The terrible thing is that you don't want to spend 30 minutes adjusting everything while you're just trying to slap two stories and a picture around an ad stack on page 7A (see column, Wanted: Automatic Page Makeup).
There was also the minor detail of getting everything to work together. 'Xpress and PageMaker didn't like each other's Encapsulated PostScript files (and 'Xpress still isn't thrilled with Microsoft Word 6.0). Nothing liked PostScript. Then came near daily updates of printer drivers.
So newspapers began dealing with a new group of vendors who promised to integrate pagination systems and harness the power of 'Xpress and PageMaker.
Problem was, it had never been done before.
"What we didn't know was that we were essentially an alpha site," says the anonymous New England system editor.
Software companies traditionally subject completed programs to several rounds of testing: alpha testing, which is generally run on known equipment in house; beta testing, done in a "real-world" environment; and release candidates, which are supposed to be the versions actually offered for sale unless something hideous pops up at the last minute.
"We've become a beta site, and we're down to four to five modifications a month," says the system editor. "We're doing well in advertising, not so well in editorial--they're still trying to do things that were supposed to be done a year ago." And not just little things. One of the items on the "Still Don't Work" list is the basic functionality of a mission-critical network.
Here's the same song from a different singer: "Ours has been a long and hard road over the last 10 years," says Anthony J. Ordino, vice president for operations at the Asbury Park Press. With DTI, SII, Harris and Autologic working on the Asbury Park system, "We were and are still unable to find one vendor who can supply any satisfactory software/hardware solution for us." The Press should be 90 percent paginated by the time this story is published, according to Ordino.
Let's face facts: Kicking around vendors in general and integrators in particular is our industry's equivalent of telling lawyer jokes. Vendors are the folks we love to hate.
But is it really fair? Are the integrators guilty of any sin beyond simply telling us what we wanted to hear?
Perhaps the real problem is in the concept itself. Perhaps those DTP programs, originally designed for use on a single computer run by a single user putting out a single publication, were never meant to produce a newspaper on deadline. Maybe they are the proverbial singing pigs. You know: "Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig."
Systems consultant Hawkins thinks so.
"DTP was designed for an environment where the single user at the keyboard performed all of the tasks, from origination through production and output," says Hawkins. "Newspapers are, however, a collaboration."
One problem Hawkins points to is that of software file formats. Not only are files incompatible among different programs, but they are also incompatible among different versions of the same program. Just try to open an 'Xpress 3.3 file in 'Xpress 3.1.
Worse, the entire system is limited by the capabilities of the file format. Quark-based systems, for example, put enormous effort into figuring out what is on an 'Xpress page and allowing multiple users to edit that page without messing up each other's areas--which is such a basic piece of functionality in off-the-shelf database software that it doesn't get mentioned on the packaging anymore.
Why not, then, do away with file formats and store page elements directly in the database? A decade ago, that wasn't possible with DTP systems. Hawkins contends that design compromises made then are still in effect now.
"One of our clients previously produced its editions in Quark on Macs," says Hawkins. "It's a classified paper, publishing 11 issues of about 100-120 pages per week. Each issue contains between 16,000 and 25,000 advertisements. The old system required eight operators."
With help from Hawkins, the paper developed a new semi-automated pagination system called Eagle, complete with its own hyphenation and justification routines, page editors and artwork interpreters. It has launched six new editions since the changeover and now produces 1,000-plus tabloid pages a week on two Windows-NT machines with two operators.
Says Hawkins, "The most distinctive difference between Quark and Eagle is that Eagle does not use a file system.... Data are routed directly from the databases they originated in to the page model hosted by the paginator....Pages are regenerated directly from the database in PostScript at the point of printing. The elimination of the traditional file system has allowed us to achieve facilities such as multiterminal and multiuser access to pages, true transaction rollback and page versioning."
While Hawkins says it's time to stop putting up with bad, old compromises, C.E. Steuart Dewar says the exact opposite--that it's time to stop reinventing the wheel.
Dewar agrees that 'Xpress and PageMaker are not perfect, but he believes the appropriate 'Xtensions and Plug-Ins (small programs that work with 'Xpress and Adobe products) can get them close enough. And that makes more sense than attempting to trump the thousands of hours that went into engineering such products, argues Dewar, president and chief programmer of Dewar Information Systems Corp.
"There is probably nothing that could be done in a proprietary pagination program that couldn't be done without a modification to Quark. And that approach has the advantage that one can always leverage all the development that Quark is doing in addition to the enhancements provided through 'Xtensions," says Dewar. "No small company working in a vertical market like newspapers could possibly hope to program all the functionality in Quark, at the same level of reliability, in addition to providing all the dedicated newspaper functionality too."
Part of the problem, according to Dewar, is that many of the current production processes grew from the realities of newspaper production tied to an older generation of equipment. When a newspaper purchases new equipment, it should also rethink those old processes.
"People continue to look at pagination as a composition issue rather than a production and workflow issue," says Dewar. "Within a year or two, most of the composition issues will be put to rest."
The complete solution, Dewar says, will involve integrating a DTP program like Quark into the bigger picture. "What now makes that possible is standardization of databases. If my editorial system, advertising system, circulation system, etc., are all SQL relational databases, I can write an external application that can delve and thread through those databases, sifting out the information that I need," Dewar says. "And I can write Daemons [high-level Unix programs] that sit in the background, constantly monitoring workflow problems."
Dewar is not the only one who thinks a DTP-based system can successfully produce a daily newspaper. David H. Stormont sees it happen every day.
"Right now, we are using Quark Publishing System through Scitex," says Stormont, operations director for The Christian Science Monitor, which is 100 percent paginated. "Within the next two years, we will replace Scitex with off-the-shelf hardware and software, and go direct to film or plate." Stormont, though, doesn't think the system would be suitable for sites with 100 or more seats because of limitations with the database server setup.
Jim Linehan agrees with Dewar about rethinking the production process. The managing editor of the Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader argues that some of the biggest problems in a transition to pagination involve procedures that we know that we shouldn't permit and say we don't permit--yet still wink at daily.
"One of the positive parts of pagination is that we now get to fix things that weren't necessarily broken but were never quite right," says Linehan. The Union-Leader paginates almost all of its editorial product and is now working on advertising. "Things we've cobbled together over time as solutions...now can be better controlled at the terminal stage. It requires a lot more forethought. You need to bring in people from other departments to talk about how they do it now and how we could do it better."
In the end, that may be the real key, according to Linda L. Nelson, director of new media and technology for The Village Voice and the L.A. Weekly. Take, for example, the bottleneck introduced by raster-image processors.
Under the old razor and wax system, it didn't matter whether 80 percent of the pages were finished an hour before deadline. It only mattered whether 80 percent of the work was done.
That won't wash with a pagination system. You can't set a page image a little bit at a time.
"System issues become user problems," says Nelson, whose papers are roughly 75 percent paginated. "I've been more stringent about deadlines than I was before. The editors don't like it, but I don't have 1,000 RIPs in here."
You've heard it: "May you live in interesting times." As the newspaper industry makes a complete technology transition, we are having about as many interesting times as we can stand.
Let us pray that at some point our reality will start looking more like our vendors' heavenly demos--and that pigs will eventually learn how to sing.
Chris Feola is news systems editor at the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American. E-mail is cjfeola@aol.com .
Susan Carter, Cleveland (Tenn.) Daily Banner, 1505 25th St. N.W., Cleveland, Tenn. 37320. Phone, (615) 472-5041; fax, (615) 476-1046.
Tim Hawkins, Newspaper Publishing Systems, 5 Arden Close, Bracknell, Berks RG12 2SG, United Kingdom. E-mail, timh@lootlon.loot.co.uk ; phone, 011-44-171-625-0266; fax, 011-44-171-625-7921.
Jim Linehan, Manchester Union-Leader, 100 William Loeb Drive, Manchester, N.H., 03103. Phone, (603) 668-4321, ext. 322; fax, (603) 668-0382.
Linda L. Nelson, The Village Voice, 842 Broadway, New York, N.Y., 10003. E-mail, 72603.1746@compuserve.com ; phone, (212) 475-3300; fax, (212) 475-8846.
Anthony J. Ordino, Asbury Park Press, 3601 Hwy. 66, P.O. Box 1550, Neptune, N.J., 07754. Phone, (908) 922-6000.
Mike Spain, The Times Union, Box 1500, Albany, N.Y. 12212. E-mail, mspain@hearst.com; phone, (518) 454-5060; fax, (518) 454-5628.
David H. Stormont, The Christian Science Monitor, 1 Norway Street, Mail Stop P-214, Boston, Mass. 02115. E-mail, stormont@csps.com ; phone, (617) 450-2350.
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