Design philosophy: all information in this web site should be accessible to the intended audience regardless of platform, browser, or size of screen. Graphics are kept to a minimum to reduce download times. If you see a frame or an animated GIF, feel free to flame me mercilessly.

This site uses fully compliant cascading style sheets (CSS). Older browsers should display text in their default fonts, while more recent browsers will all display fully formatted text. (However, the styles sheets will look best viewed in Internet Explorer 4.0 or above.) The site also complies with major accessibility standards.

Colophon

The base font for this page is Trebuchet MS, a free font from Microsoft designed for on-screen readability at small point sizes. The headlines are 32 pt Times bold italic, combining elegance, classical proportions, and compactness.

The logo is variation on the original logo from Aldus PageMaker and depicts Aldus Manutius, a student of Johannes Gutenberg and inventor of italics. This is to echo the roots of desktop publishing, both in the 1450s and the 1980s. The logo uses Courier from ITC to evoke the feel of metal type and Poetica from Adobe Systems to evoke the era of hand lettering.

Made on a Macintosh using Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia DreamWeaver.

Report from Seybold Boston 2000

February 15, 2000

After a troubling, fact filled, but ultimately inconclusive keynote by Thad McIlroy on "The Future of Publishing," we got down to business. Chuck Geschke, scientist at Xerox PARC and co-founder of Adobe Systems, is retiring, and he was presented with a tribute and a lifetime achievement award by Seybold. The son and grandson of printers, Chuck was warned at an early age not to go into printing. He did anyway, but chose to concentrate on the science of publishing and helped revolutionize the field. We are all grateful for his work and join Seybold Seminars in lauding him.

Last year, John Warnock said that Adobe wants to "seriously upgrade the web." This year the theme was: "Revolution 2.0." Adobe claimed several times that having revolutionized print, they were now revolutionizing web design and the ability of publishers to make money on the web. It seems to me that it takes less and less to make a revolution today than it did when Chuck and John started.

All this is ironic considering it followed McIlroy's address and a bleak panel discussion by a mish mash of experts from wildly diverse parts of the industry. The conclusion from large amounts of research, including a lengthy study by Frank Romano of RIT and his grad students, was that while print is not dead, the days of growth are over. He used as an example a recent survey done by the U.S. Army of new recruits, but the Newspaper Association of America came to the same conclusion: People read less, and the younger the age group, the less they read and the more they prefer the web to TV or newspapers. In a zero-sum game, print will lose both readership and ad revenue to other media. The first problem is that advertising is not a zero-sum game. Advertising is exploding. It's everywhere, and there is no sign that there will be anything but more advertising in the future. The phrase "dumbing down" was not used, but it would have been highly appropriate.

Another point they made was that print consolidating is dead and specialization is in. As providers struggle to maintain position in a mature field, prices will have to drop, people will demand better color, deadlines will become tighter, and runs will become smaller — meaning people with a niche to fill will do best. This, combined with record paper sales, point to the increased importance of desktop printing and on-demand printing. So while newspapers may be hurting and large print houses will need to "repurpose," desktop publishers would seem to have a bright future if they can find a niche.

Unlike last year, all keynote speakers shared the same stage and followed each other. This was a marked improvement over last year, when you had to choose between, say, Warnock and Tim Gill of Quark. I missed a lot. This year, I got to see the presentations from Macromedia, Quark, and Adobe in succession, and it was instructive.

Macromedia announced FreeHand 9 <http://www.macromedia.com/software/freehand/>, with improved integration with Flash 4, a Protect from Import feature that prevents FreeHand-generated Flash graphics from being downloaded from a Web site, Live Enveloping, which lets you distort an object by surrounding it with an envelope, Perspective Grids, which let you add three-dimensional effects, an updated Blend function, an improved Autotrace function, a new Magic Wand tool, and a Symbol Library.

Dave Mendels demonstrated new capabilities in Flash and Dreamweaver, and discussed the "next generation" web site, which he characterized as being high in production value and emotional impact, mission critical, dynamic, but apparently devoid of actual information. His illustration was a coffee shop with an extremely expensive web page that could be viewed in a kiosk in the shop or on a PDA by someone looking for the shop. Yeah, right — Macromedia's products are outstanding, but they need a better example of a mission critical web site with high production values than a coffee shop. One interesting development was Flash having embedded pages that were different printed than on screen, so you could view an ad for a coffee shop, but when you printed it, there was a map and a coupon. Slick! He summed all this up by showing Macromedia's view of web publishing with a flow chart that showed the creation of a web site, with their products serving the needs of each section:

Analysis	Design	Production	Delivery	Personalization	Display
"Aria"—real time tracking and reporting tool	Freehand (storyboarding, popup page sizes), Flash, Dreamweaver with WML support	"Whirlwind"		Flash (scriptable)	Shockwave, Flash

Next, Tim Gill of Quark spoke. Not only has Quark not gone out of business since InDesign came out, they are doing quite well, thankyouverymuch, and appear more focused after last year's rather lame showing. Although he mentioned several features of the forthcoming QuarkXPress 5 (web and PDF features, tables, and layers), the important announcement was the release of QuarkDMS, a digital media database management system that has been in development since "web" meant a type of press. In addition, Quark showed eStage, an XML based client-server system for managing content across sites, and avenue.quark, which makes QuarkXPress XML ready. Gill said that venture capital in publishing was drying up because we are close to ideal in print production, with no innovation saving us more than 10-20%. In other words, there is nothing comparable to the desktop publishing revolution on the horizon. The then likened XML to PAL/NTSC and said that for the first time, print and web publishers will be able to take advantage of standards in the way that video producers have for years. XML and Quark's new products will make QuarkXPress become less like a pixie stick and more like M&Ms. In other words, it will still be good, but will be less messy and easier to share.

Finally, John Warnock came with a troupe of minions to show Adobe's offerings. The major themes, unsurprisingly, were InDesign ("the most successful product launch in Adobe's 17 year history") and PDF, but Adobe's "Flash killer," Live Motion, made a surprise appearance. Adobe unveiled LiveMotion — or perhaps "let it slip out." In the demo, we were told that Adobe could not reveal the name of this top secret product and it was called, simply, "the product." But once the icon was double clicked, the splash screen clearly showed the name "LiveMotion." So the demonstrator risked his career to bring us this secret, but since the demo never crashed — unlike several others — I think his job is safe.

LiveMotion (featuring the "familiar Adobe interface" — colleague Rick Dumont counted 21 palettes during the demo) lets you drag objects, including EPS and Photoshop documents, onto a canvas, where you can apply styles can add bevels, drop shadows, and other effects. Like After Effects, LiveMotion allows you to animate the objects in a timeline window, as when the presenter dragged and dropped a Photoshop file onto the LiveMotion canvas, exploded it into several objects, then animated an object from one of the layers. In addition to exporting files as animated GIFs, JPEGs, and SVG ("based on XML"), it will also export Flash files — a big change of direction for Adobe. No word on an anticipated price or ship date.

Adobe also announced InProduction, a solution for managing PDF files through a print production workflow. InProduction extends Acrobat with five integrated tools for preflighting, handling color separation and conversion, specifying trim and bleed, trapping in PDF files. InProduction the next piece in the puzzle for Adobe, which wants to make InDesign the heart of a family of publishing for every step of the publishing workflow. InProduction includes the following tools:

Preflight: users can create, edit, share and reuse profiles, then use them to identify and correct errors before a job is sent to production.
Separator: users can specify, preview, and create color separations, map spot colors to process colors, and see on-screen previews of separations, including overlays and overprint.
Trim and Bleed: The Trim/Bleed tool provides precise control for defining imageable areas, as well as specifying or changing the media, bleed, trim or art boxes. The ability to specify art boxes is a requirement for the new PDF/X-1 standard.
Color Converter: users can convert LAB, RGB or CMYK to CMYK using ICC profiles. Color Converter also allows tagging or untagging of profiles within a PDF file.
Adobe in-RIP Trapping: users can specify trapping parameters for later output to a PostScript 3 RIP.

In addition, you can use InProduction Preflight Online <http://preflightpdf.adobe.com> to electronically submit files up to 10MB for preflighting. Preflight reports are then emailed to the customer or can be securely viewed on the Web. This service can be used up to ten times free.

Like Quark, Adobe showed the future of their flagship DTP app, InDesign. Among other highlights, InDesign 2.0 will allow creation of type on a path and vertical justification. Other product previews included GoLive 5.0 and the Stilton server that has been in production since a brief preview at last year's expo. The combo will allow not only client-server web site building by multiple user, but will allow a designer to resize a graphic in GoLive while Stilton resamples the graphic from the original Photoshop file. Like avenue.quark, GoLive will extend Adobe's support for XML and will feature an e-commerce plug-in for connecting to corporate databases.

The persistent themes at the show were the internet and XML. Groupware, servers, and "publish anywhere" solutions abounded. From Thad's reference to "worshipping at the altar of XML" onward, virtually every speaker mentioned XML. I think it's safe to say that XML is here to stay. XML. Rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? If you're not familiar with XML, you'd better learn. XML will be everywhere from SVG to DMS. (How's that? Three hyperlinked acronyms in one sentence!) On the other hand, while XML will be more and more prevalent, it will probably also become less and less obvious, just as in a few years PDF will be so common it's practically invisible. Applications like Extensis Portfolio and Macromedia Dreamweaver will simply handle the XML behind the scenes, while you the user reap the benefits of easy data exchange and portability.

Walking the floor, I was surprised at how little things had really changed. The only major changes were the absence of Apple Computer, who skipped Seybold to concentrate on Internet World, and the large number of electronic book systems on display. In fact, there was an "E-Books Pavilion." This is a burgeoning field, but like a related technology, PDAs, it may take years to mature. Today's e-books fall into two main categories:

Internet based systems you connect to from your computer. These include Ebrary, iBooks, and Adobe's own PDF Web Merchant and ePaper. These are all ways for you to read your books over the internet, with security and e-commerce features. For example, PDF Web Merchant allows you to sell PDFs online which are readable only by a certain person, or only on a particular machine to prevent piracy. Other systems allow you to buy one of a set of books the merchant has available, add them to your "library," and access your library over the internet. Ebrary (whose founders include John Warnock's son Christopher) and iBooks are notable for their security systems, which allow anyone to search for content and preview it, but only read it by paying.
Small tablet sized devices you download documents into. There were several of these, but the only impressive ones were extremely expensive and lacked color screens and comfortable feel. It will be years before color LCD displays become inexpensive enough for a real e-book. In the meantime, e-books of this class are targeted at large corporations who need people on the floor to have up to date manuals or delivery drivers to have up to date tracking lists. Consumer use of these was best summed up by an attendee I stood next to who was having one unit's virtues extolled to him. The presenter finally went too far when he referred to taking the unit to the beach and had the visitor laugh in his face.

Two technologies that could have a major impact on e-books was completely missing from the show, since they're only in development. Xerox's "electronic paper" and E Ink's Immedia are perhaps the most important new technologies since PostScript brought us high resolution printing. Electronic paper is rather like paper with toner embedded in it, except that the toner can be rearranged as needed and the paper reused virtually forever. Immedia, already in limited deployment, allows you to print "electronic ink" on virtually anything and update the image later. Other forthcoming technologies to watch include Linux or Be based internet appliances and the Crusoe chip from Transmeta, which promises to make portables generate less heat and consume less power — thus making batteries last longer.

The obligatory stop at the Adobe booth showed an interesting change. Unlike last year, there was no PageMaker pod, and the demo CDs they were passing out had demos of InDesign and both PageMill and GoLive, but not PageMaker! However, as I note in this month's essay, this does not mean there is no future for PageMaker. In fact, after pressing doggedly, I was assured that "Adobe has no plans to discontinue PageMaker."

There was also no display of type products at the Adobe booth, and very little in the way of type products anywhere at the show. However, Bitstream was there, showing, among other things, a cross platform version of Web Font. They also announced the launch of MyFonts.com, a showcase of the world's fonts from one portal. Joined some of the industry's top font foundries, MyFonts.com provides the largest collection of fonts ever assembled, according to Bitstream. The site features new ways to find and purchase fonts online, and offers unique typographic resources and a forum for interacting with font experts. The foundries that have agreed to participate as partners with Bitstream in MyFonts.com at the time of this release include Agfa, Galapagos, ITC, Jack Yan and Associates, Letraset, Monotype, Microsoft, Paratype, P22, Sooy Type Foundry, and URW++. Fonts from Adobe, Apple, Chank, and Linotype are also represented in the MyFonts.com catalog. Some of the features of MyFonts.com include:

MyFonts Valet, which enables users to browse and locate fonts using keywords a novice or expert would understand
Identafont, which allows users to scan images of typefaces and upload them to MyFonts.com for identification
TypeXplorer, which lets users adjust typographic measurements to find similar fonts based on user-defined criteria
Find fonts similar to a particular typeface design using the "Show me more like this'' feature
Test drive a font in your own text
Explore the world of fonts with links to typographic resources available on the Web
Interact with type experts online, ask questions, or join the online MyFonts Forum

While Bitstream was the only type foundry at the show, there was a profusion of stock art vendors. Getty One and Digital Vision were the most interesting — the former for its extensive collection and easily used and searchable web site, the latter for new content. Also notable was Random Eye, a Photoshop plug-in that allows you search image collections from within Photoshop.

As always, many hardware products were shown, including increasingly sharp inkjets in every size. Of particular note was the Epson booth, where a large sign promised a 16 year life on color prints with a cost per page of less than a (U.S.) dollar. Adobe PressReady support was everywhere. I don't expect laser printers or imagesetters to fade away however (pun intended), despite a relatively sparse showing. MicroNet showed their FireWire SANcube (storage-area network) server appliance and 3Com showed off gigabit ethernet on copper, but both hardware and software took a back seat to the internet at this year's expo.

I felt some of the excitement from last year's show was missing — there were no announcements of the scale of Adobe's InDesign and GoLive demos that dominated the show last year — end it seemed a bit smaller, but there was a growing internet presence, and I think that in the future, groupware may become as big as e-books were this year.

All in all, a good show.

STEPPS -- Stop Tax Exempt Private Property Sprawl -- Framingham