The New Rules of Pagination

Three decades of technological change have kept it an elusive dream. Will new desktop-publishing software and intranets help complete the revolution?

by Bob Sims

At most newspapers, full pagination remains an unfulfilled dream, a Holy Grail sought for 30-plus years, only to change shape and purpose just as it is nearly grasped.

The idea that a newspaper could assemble pages electronically and send them straight to printing plates—or even a digital press—has intrigued many since first envisioned in the 1960s. The promise, at least at the beginning, was drastic cuts in cost, massively streamlined operations and loftier profits.

Today, not only is the definition of pagination changing daily, but so are the reasons for pursuing it. Even the smallest newspapers are becoming profit-oriented information companies that:

• Provide not just printed dailies and weeklies, but also customized news products and microzoned advertising.
• Provide offerings on the Internet, television and radio—and even signage from truck sides to billboards. They own magazines and produce entertainment for television. If federal regulations change, they could delve even deeper into broadcast ownership.
• Pursue greater quality in all products, a move triggered by the need to satisfy advertisers. Rather than simply saving money, newspapers today reduce the number of hands that touch the product to improve quality.
• Have too long been bystanders of the information age, pursuing shortsighted goals as the communications revolution raged onward. As technology advanced, newspaper companies often chose to create separate organizations to deal with e-business or niche publishing.

All of these factors affect "pagination" and what it means for any individual company. It's a given today that traditional pagination—the electronic compilation of all page components, including type, graphics, photos and logos for final output to a completed page—has been achieved, at least by some. However, newspaper companies are already redefining pagination as new software makes it possible for pagination solutions to be just parts of even larger, enterprise-wide, information-management systems.

The day is near when an ad compositor in Portland will pull a background graphic from his corporation-wide bank of servers in Philadelphia and place it in a Pillsbury ad bought with co-op dollars by a local independent grocery chain. The ad will be customized for 25 different sub-Zip-zoned editions of the paper delivered near the stores and become part of 25 different fully paginated pages. The resulting family of ads will then find its way through the computer network to land on several of the newspaper's World Wide Web pages, newspaper-owned billboards near the stores, and in-store signage. Meanwhile, they will be tracked and invoiced by the system before being permanently stored. And at another newspaper in the same company, an ad compositor will pick up the ad electronically to localize it for publications in Peoria.

Realistic?

Granted, this example is fiction. But newspapers large and small are finding that solutions can be much bigger than "pagination."

We're Getting There

Who's paginating, why and where?

NAA is surveying U.S. newspapers to determine their level of pagination. Responses continue to arrive and soon will be vetted by statisticians to validate the findings.

But the preliminary numbers tell an intriguing story. Only 3 percent of survey respondents are not paginating at all, meaning they are still outputting type to galleys and pasting up ads and elements on the page. At the other end of the spectrum, complete pagination was claimed by 26 percent of respondents. That puts the vast majority of papers at some level of partial pagination.

While pagination improves quality, reduces costs and saves time, NAA Pre-Press Manager Joan Phillips says that many papers may have pursued it for the wrong reasons. Most papers wanted full pagination so they could digitize their work flow, opening the door to computer-to-plate and, someday, computer-to-press. That's a noble concept, but it overlooks one simple fact: The rest of the world has yet to become digital.

"Everybody thought, ‘That is where I have to be,'" says Phillips. "Unfortunately, it is not going to happen unless all the companies that supply material to papers supply them electronically—not until all advertising is made electronic.

"I don't know if the goal for a lot of newspapers these days is to be fully paginated," Phillips adds.

Pagination means new hardware, software and retraining, and those factors are often cited in the NAA survey as stumbling blocks. Without naming names, a quick glance at the survey shows respondents saying, "We paginate some, but...

• Not in classifieds. We're waiting for software, training and upgraded equipment."
• Our printer strips in color ads."
• Our software is inefficient."
• Our ads are built individually and pasted up manually."
• We are limited by computer space and training."

You get the picture. But it doesn't have to be this way. Look at Europe, where 80 percent of newspapers are fully paginated, according to some estimates. There are many reasons for the trans-Atlantic disparity.

"They seem to adapt to new technologies more quickly," says Phillips. "We keep everything until it dies. They don't do that to the level we do."

European newspapers also tend to have more thoroughly consolidated printing operations, which necessitate fully paginated pages that can be electronically transferred across great distances.

Still, even on this side of the Atlantic, more newspapers are making pagination a priority.

"I think pagination must happen," says Frank Pazoureck, production manager for pagination solutions at Systems Integrators Inc. of Sacramento, who has been working on pagination solutions since 1975.

That conclusion follows a long and twisted road. When solutions became viable in the mid-to-late 1980s, Pazoureck says, some companies took up the pagination mantra quickly. "Others felt too frightened to make the training time necessary to take the plunge," says Pazoureck.

A key turning point came when the technology allowed a graphical interface and imagesetting capability. That development, spanning 1984 to 1987, meant hardware and software could handle graphics much better and print them at higher resolutions.

Riding the 'XPress Train

1987 also saw the introduction of QuarkXPress, a world-changing piece of desktop software that gave editors and designers the ability to shape pages as never before. In hindsight, says Pazoureck, that may have been a sideways step that delayed full pagination.

"Quark made a great contribution to where we're at today—electronic paste-up," agrees Don Oldham, who heads Digital Technology International, a Springville, Utah, developer of pre-press systems.

Quark and the 2 million users who adopted 'XPress can only today see the opportunities they missed, he argues.

Quark is a closed system that, while allowing others to write extensions to add functionality, remains an "outside" component of any multipurpose system, Oldham contends.

What's more, it was never designed for broadsheet newspaper production, and without additional applications or 'XTensions, lacks specific features the industry needs.

Further complicating matters is the fact that the first wave of pagination systems, imperfect as they were, lived up to their promised cost and labor savings. For the past decade, that's made incremental improvements more difficult to justify for the early adopters. Still, some papers are now on their second or even third system, indicating that room for improvement still exists.

Enter InDesign

Make no mistake, handling printed pages electronically is easier said than done. Dozens of U.S. vendors write software to power pagination and electronic page building. But only two have penetrated the worldwide market and become industry standards—must-haves found on millions of desktops in virtually every publishing company.

And starting this summer, the two will begin competing head-to-head.

For the past decade, Quark has been the power behind pagination. The other player is Adobe, whose Illustrator and Photoshop software did for electronic images what Quark did for pages. Adobe also is behind the Portable Document Format, which carries the characteristics and appearance of a file from any source to any destination, where it is just as viewable and printable (think PostScript, minus the font and image problems). Expected to become an international standard for the printing industry, PDF is already the format of choice for electronic ad transmission.

In the past year, Adobe has developed a challenger to QuarkXPress called InDesign (see sidebar, p. 10). The printing world, excluding Quark's headquarters, is buzzing about it. Code-named K2 during development, it had been kept a very public "secret."

Adobe's co-chairmen, Charles Geschke and John Warnock, unveiled InDesign at the Seybold Conference in Boston March 2. "The publishing industry is waiting for systems that fulfill the promise of a complete digital workflow—an integrated platform that offers increased productivity, rock-solid reliability and cost efficiency," said Warnock.

Now that it's in vendor hands and sev-eral industry suppliers are integrating it into their own software, the buzz has become a roar. InDesign, say some, is the answer to what's held up pagination's progress.

Based on a new, object-oriented architecture, InDesign's open design allows developers to tailor the program to specific customer needs. It means Adobe, its third-party developers and system integrators can deliver custom publishing solutions for magazines, advertising agencies, catalogs, retailers, design studios and even newspapers. Especially newspapers—the first three third-party developers to jump on the InDesign bandwagon are DTI, SII and Baseview Systems Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich.

InDesign goes on sale in June at an estimated street price of $699 and comes with the capability to open, among other files, Quark documents and PDF files. Adobe plans to offer InDesign for a limited time at "Happy Meal prices," says Gary Cosimini, Adobe's business-development executive for publishing.

Contrast Adobe's momentum with that of Quark. The highlight of 1998 for Quark was the introduction of version 4.0 of 'XPress, which came with so many features that it generated vocal support. But Quark has long been dogged by a reputation for poor customer service and tech support.

In rode the company's first-ever chief operating officer, Chuck Bland, announced as the new visionary in March 1998, but gone less than a year later. He had pushed the company to develop a marketing subsidiary to integrate Quark software with complementary third-party products (TechNews, March/April 1999, p. 26).

That effort is described by Quark spokesman Bob Monzel as nothing short of a disaster: "We were flooded with high-priced salespeople that didn't have anything [to sell]." That marketing company, "built too fast, too soon," has now changed but not altogether disappeared, he says.

Bland's moves to increase customer-support staff by 40 percent and improve manufacturing and shipping operations for the most part remain in place, Monzel says. "Just because Chuck is no longer with Quark as COO doesn't mean the progress won't stay intact."

Fred Ebrahimi, Quark's president and CEO, and co-owner Tim Gill, are firmly in charge of the company, Monzel says.

Privately held Quark also tried last August to buy all or a significant portion of Adobe's common stock in a cash deal representing a large premium over Adobe's market value. A Quark acquisition would have forced a selloff of the Pagemaker and K2 (now InDesign) arms of Adobe because of federal monopoly laws. Quark's proposal was rejected by Adobe's management in a letter dated Aug. 21, 1998, and after considering a hostile acquisition, Quark opted to back down.

Despite its rocky year, Quark's design team and engineers are more than ready to compete with InDesign, according to Monzel. "We like to think they are going head to head with us," he says. "We're the standard that they are trying to meet."

Quark 5.0 is planned for release by year's end, says company founder Gill. The software will have more bells and whistles, including a table editor, cascading style sheets, HTML export and PDF import. Meanwhile, Quark is perfecting its digital-asset manager, Quark Digital Management System, for shipment this summer, according to Gill.

In the meantime, Monzel urges cooler heads to examine InDesign in action—and ponder whether PDF is really the future of file formatting for worldwide printing.

Others welcome the new solution. DTI has long developed its own composition modules, largely because it did not want to be trapped by Quark—a program that offers so many features it can be cumbersome, according to Oldham. But DTI plans to scrap its proprietary paginator in favor of InDesign, which fits well with its plans for database-driven, "collaborative" solutions, he says.

Others plan to play both sides. Kirk Norlin, manager of marketing at SII, believes pagination is a matter of mapping any number of technologies to a newspaper's needs. "Every newspaper works in a different way," he says, noting that SII will introduce a new publishing solution at NEXPO in Las Vegas this June, but likely won't walk away from either 'XPress or InDesign.

Even as SII becomes an InDesign integrator, Norlin worries about products that are too tightly integrated. That can limit the hardware or front-end sources that run the software, he argues. SII believes few publishers "want to make a big shift" in how they are operating, he says.

In this period of new choices, the question of which software should power page- and ad-design systems or keep track of stories, headlines and pictures is becoming less important. Whether based on Quark, InDesign or some other widget, the systems focus is turning to managing the workflow of these widely diverse activities on varied platforms and software. One platform in particular, the corporate intranet, offers new promise in tying together loose ends.

Integrating With Intranets

Web-browser-powered intranets are already used by many news companies to train and inform their workers. It's common now, for instance, to have all human- resources information concerning insurance, payroll, even vacation and leave issues, handled across a companywide intranet.

Driven by a need to reduce costs for expensive client-server hardware, Knight Ridder has created a central, intranet-based database for its financial officers which has slashed paperwork and brought standard practices to all 37 of its newspapers. It later created a similar multiuser database for its phone rooms to crosscheck information.

At other newspapers, intranets handle everything from archives to graphic information—and now, editorial systems. The advantage? By doing these things with a standard Internet browser and protocols, everyone can share information despite all the varied software and platforms found in a typical media company.

This is not an entirely new concept. In a paper presented in April at the Seventh World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Vlad Ionesco, then a researcher with KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, reported on a Swedish daily that has operated since June 1997 on an intranet-based production system.

The intranet for the 67,000-circulation, two-edition, six-day newspaper manages everything from tracking the work of individual compositors and designers to page scheduling. The system accepts messages from QuarkXPress about page status (through a QuarkXTension) and from other production equipment. Written in Java, a language that can run on almost any computer, it also enables variety of production reports.

The research paper, available on the World Wide Web at www7.scu.edu.au/ programme/fullpapers/1918/com279.htm, deems such a "non-vendor-dependent" system near-perfect for newspapers because "newspaper production is a complex and suboptimized process, characterized by heterogeneous computer systems in a distributed environment and with tight time schedules." In layman's terms, we've got a lot of junk that we use to do a lot of stuff, and we have a tough time meeting our deadlines.

Newspaper suppliers also are joining the intranet movement. Saxotech last year introduced "@ccess" modules allowing reporters and editors to browse, edit, format and file copy using Web-browsing software. Like the Swiss newspaper, @ccess finds its power in Java.

Similar flexibility is possible through programs based on IBM's Lotus Notes. This program is being used to share files among databases at newspapers for wire capture, editing and other editorial functions.

SII offers a Lotus Notes and 'XPress solution, installed at the sprawling Associated Newspapers plant in London. In this country, a number of newspapers, including Howard Publications Inc. of Oceanside, Calif., use intranet software manufactured by DeskNet of New York City and NewsEngin of St. Louis to handle various aspects of editorial production, including QuarkXPress-based pagination.

Along with their price—hundreds, if not thousands of dollars less per seat—such systems offer the ability to easily tweak nearly every production variable to develop truly custom work flows.

Other third-party products are readying themselves for intranet use. Adobe's InDesign, and its Web products like GoLive, include Internet and therefore intranet capabilities, says Cosimini. And in all its other products, Adobe has ordered engineers to hang hooks for HTML and other Internet/intranet protocols "anywhere it's logical," so they can be useful in browser applications. "In the future, you might have a URL for each element in a file system," Cosimini says.

Mixing open intranet capabilities with design and publishing tools may be the missing link that smooths work flow to the extent that true full-page output is worthwhile, Cosimini argues.

"I love this idea," he says. "It is going to provide a scalability for systems that wasn't possible before."

Whether intranet or Internet, Quark or Adobe, custom-built or homegrown, the three-decades-old pagination era rambles on. And while newspapers' needs continue to evolve, few question the need to improve the most basic building block of their pre-press workflow.

"Pagination is the Holy Grail," Pazoureck says. "Everybody's on this quest."

Bob Sims is a free-lance writer based in Kissimmee, Fla. E-mail, bkscoop@aol.com; phone, (407) 935-1567.

Sources

• Gary Cosimini, Adobe Systems Inc., 780 Third Ave, 41st Floor, New York, N.Y. 10017-2024. E-mail, gcosimin@adobe.com; phone, (212) 446-3804; fax, (212) 446-3802.
  
  
• Vlad Ionesco, Netsolutions Sweden AB, Humlegårdsgatan 20, Box 14083, SE-104 40 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail, vlad.ionesco@netsolutions.se; phone, +46 8 587 487 82; fax, +46 8 587 487 50. View Ionesco's research paper at www7.scu.edu.au/programme/ fullpapers/1918/com279.htm.
  
  
• Bob Monzel, Quark Inc., 1800 Grant St., Denver, Colo. 80203. E-mail, bmonzel@quark.com; phone, (303) 894-8888; fax, (307) 772-7123.
  
  
• Kirk Norlin and Frank Pazoureck, System Integrators Inc., 1300 National Drive, Sacramento, Calif. 95834. Norlin's e-mail, norlin@sii.com; Pazoureck's e-mail, frank@sii.com; phone, (800) 445-4744; fax, (916) 929-9481.
  
  
• Don Oldham and Alyson Oldham, Digital Technology International, 1180 N. Mountain Springs Parkway, Springville, Utah 84663-3012. Don Oldham's e-mail, d_oldham@dtint.com; Alyson Oldham's e-mail, Aoldham@dtint.com; phone, (801) 853-5000; fax, (801) 853-5002.
  
  
• Joan Phillips, NAA, 1921 Gallows Road, Suite 600, Vienna, Va. 22182-3900. E-mail, philj@naa.org; phone, (703) 902-1856; fax, (703) 902-1842.
  
  

TechNews Volume 5, Number 3: May/June 1999

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