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From: ba@excelan.COM (Bob Ackerman)
Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re: Which is better?  Textprocessing langs or DeskTop publishing pgms?
Message-ID: <455@excelan.COM>
Date: 22 Sep 89 23:09:59 GMT
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Reply-To: ba@na.UUCP (Bob Ackerman)
Organization: Excelan, Inc., San Jose, Califonia
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The comments in this series of ploys, counters, gotchas, rejoinders,
sallies and general backchat have focused principally on two aspects
in the production of printed material: typography and page layout.

There is, however, an aspect of the production of printed material
that seems generally to have been ignored, but is important to many 
producers of same--viz., graphic images of various kinds. 

Two points (or maybe metapoints) here: If I missed any pertinent articles, my
apologies to the authors for not including the appropriate references. To 
those readers who don't have to deal with graphic images, you may want to 
quit reading now before you become inflamed.

There are two aspects of most WYSIWYG systems that are important to users
of graphic images. One is production technical; the other is administrative.

On the technical side, many packages allow you to create and/or manipulate
graphic images in context on the page (Interleaf, FrameMaker, Ventura Publisher,
Word are the ones I am most familiar with). It is possible to create or load
an image, put it in its location on a page, label its elements and see
approximately (dependent on the resolution of the display device) how it will 
look when printed.

On the administrative side, it is often easier to produce review copies of
documents with live images in place. The graphic images also live with the 
document and are always available for maintenance. It also seems to me that 
the time necessary to produce a finished image on revision is less than that 
for pen-and-ink art.  This seems especially true for art that, by its nature, 
is best created at one size and then reduced/enlarged. Photographic processes 
are slower than electronic processes, often not only because of the physics 
but also because not every shop can afford inhouse photographic equipment.

Of course, as I'm sure every other reader is now clamoring to point out, 
there is a tradeoff here: Electronic images are not as crisp as pen-and-ink 
images, and the difference is more noticeable to the general reader than the
difference between metal type and laser type. Everyone will have noticed 
images with lines at a shallow diagonal with a bad case of the jaggies. Some 
care with the creation of the images can reduce the effects, but certainly 
will not eliminate them. Nonetheless, for many kinds of documents and many
kinds of images, electronic images are advantageous.

Bob Ackerman
ba@excelan.com