Software giants' latest, greatest prove print's not dead -- yet

BOSTON -- Print mavens got a cold, dreary reception at the Seybold Seminars last month. Outside the convention center, the slushy streets, gray skies and biting wind served to keep things grim. Inside, dozens of sessions proclaimed the death of print. "Roll over and die" was the theme of the week.

Fortunately, the word did not trickle down to the not-insignificant number of people who avoided the fancy sessions and stayed with the exhibitors in the main arena, Feb. 7-11. New workflow products for ad processing, along with new tools from Adobe and Quark as well as new products from traditional newspaper suppliers belied the doomsayers up the escalators.

What did trickle from the conference rooms in the center's third floor to the exhibition halls on the lower floors were a veritable kitchen sink's worth of beta products, actual working products and some of the year's hottest acronyms, DAM, MAM and XML. Everyone was touting the importance of Digital Asset Management as the way to keep print publications afloat, with some vendors going their neighbors one better with Media Asset Management (the same as DAM, but it costs more) and "eXtensible Markup Language compatibility" for good measure. Adobe and Quark each have XML compatible formats -- or will any day now -- and dozens of others are piling on the bandwagon. Lowly archive systems are now DAM (or MAM) tools, which, of course, store data with XML tags to allow repurposing of content.

InDesign, unveiled by Adobe Systems Corp. of San Jose at Seybold Boston last year, was everywhere on the show floor, along with companion products InProduction and InCopy, products designed to help the workflow process on the tail end of the pre-press operation (InProduction) and copy editing on the other end (InCopy). Other products shown off by Adobe included updates to InDesign (Look! Like last year! Except it's a set of new features that don't work!), PressReady for color proofing on the desktop (Hmmm. Wasn't that announced last year?) and PDF Merchant, a server solution for distributing documents securely. Oh yes, everything here uses XML, or will someday.

Quark Inc. of Denver, not to be outdone, announced that its long-awaited digital asset management solution -- Quark.DMS, in beta at last year's Seybold Boston -- has shipped. Quark also announced: eStage, a database-driven publishing system designed to help in the production of catalogs and other direct marketing items; Avenue.Quark, which will automate some of the process of converting XPress documents into XML-formatted documents (and vice-versa); XPress 5.0 (Hmmm. Wasn't that announced last year, too?), which will create PDF files as well as use XML tags, and an as-yet unnamed product for web site management.

Adobe noise
As last year, InDesign was generating a lot of noise. What Adobe and its partners had last year were alpha and beta products as well as a promise of a different way of doing things. This year, they had shipping products from dozens of vendors to exhibit in their partner pavilion. Longtime newspaper vendors have incorporated InDesign into their products -- or at least started the process -- using InDesign to replace existing modules (in the case of Digital Technology International -- DTI -- of Springville, Utah) or supplement them (in the case of Baseview Products of Ann Arbor, Mich.).

InCopy, a new module from Adobe, is designed to bring some of the functionality of InDesign to traditional copy desk jobs. Working much like InDesign without the layout capability, InCopy gives a tight link between the layout and content, allowing reporters and editors to see line endings, column breaks and the like. They also can use some of the standard editing functions common in newspaper front-end systems. Newspaper vendors who have already announced that they would incorporate InDesign -- DTI, Baseview and System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento -- announced they are incorporating InCopy into their products.

Erik Schut, system architect for Mediasystemen, a pre-press supplier in the Netherlands, said that for him, using InCopy means he doesn't have to write a piece of core technology, but can build on what Adobe has given him.

"InCopy is InDesign with the design functions removed," Schut said. "With this, I can start a new document without a shape or get a document exported from InDesign and write to fit the shape."

Schut said it also had "additional functionality for reporters and editors, such as galley mode and revision tracking as well as changes to the user interface to make it more word based, removing some of the palates" that Adobe products scatter about the desktop.

Schut said, however, that InCopy was somewhat limited, and newspaper suppliers would be able to distinguish themselves by using its plug-in architecture to add functionality required by newsrooms.

Alyson Oldham, marketing director for Digital Technology, said that InCopy will replace DTI's SpeedWriter, much the way InDesign replaced PageSpeed.

"We're developing plug-ins to add to the geometry view, text editor and galley view," Oldham said.

Oldham did not show much concern for giving up a piece of the core product to an outside developer. "Giving up SpeedWriter for a new generation of Adobe products has given us some flexibility," she said. "We can do XML to [Newspaper Information Text Format] NIFT to delimited text. We have the functionality we had in SpeedWriter, plus all this new stuff."

Switching to InDesign from its own in-house products has prompted some changes for DTI.

"As InCopy evolves, we've made adjustments to our own development," Oldham said. "What we first saw of InCopy, we didn't think it would work in a newspaper environment. But that has changed, the cross-pollination between us has helped."

Another arrow
Baseview, like DTI, has incorporated part of Adobe's new toolset in both its ad and editorial product lineup.

Adobe's InDesign has been incorporated into Baseview's ProductionManagerPro, allowing users to quickly check for missing fonts, improper file formats and the host of other niggling problems that cripple workflow.

Jeff Gapp, product manager for ProductionManagerPro, said InDesign was one more arrow in the quiver for him.

"If a site has ProductionManager, they can simply install InDesign and use it," Gapp said. "We already can work with [Quark] XPress 3 and 4 and the [MultiAd] Creator products. This is just another one we can use."

Gapp also liked Adobe's InProduction product, which on the surface seems to do much what his product does. "The more they can make PDFs better for pre-press, the better off I am," he said.

On the editorial side, Baseview is adding InCopy to its lineup, supplementing its existing text editor, NewsEditPro.

"NewsEdit is a combination of a text editor and a browser into the database," said David Luther, Baseview's director of development. "It would be kind of dumb to rip it out. I think people will still bang out text in it. InCopy will be an add-on that they can use when needed."

Baseview, which like many of the other newspaper suppliers, was exhibiting as part of the Adobe booth, leading to some interesting discussions about the status of existing products.

"I can't use the 'Q' word here," Luther said, showing off some of his products, "but what we are shipping is Q with InDesign to come. We have an ugly demo now with it, but should be showing the full thing at NEXPO."

Similar comments came from the folks in the SII booth in the Adobe pavilion, who were proudly showing InSIIght, a product incorporating Lotus Notes, InDesign and some other tools developed in conjunction with Associated MediaBase in London. Only after taking some furtive looks about would SII representatives say the product currently being installed in London uses Quark XPress, with InDesign integration to come later. "All I have here are screen shots," an SII representative said.

At the other end of the hall, the people from Quark were taking advantage of the slow roll-out of InDesign products, showing off features in XPress and related products that will make it easier to produce PDFs without using Adobe's Distiller, move data into and out of XPress and use content for other purposes.

With Avenue.Quark, "You can take content out of a Quark XPress document and put it in a neutral format such as XML," said Mark Hansen. "You can drag and drop into XML and come back into print or go out to the Web."

Not even alpha
Quark's web site management tool, officially unnamed but referred to as Sitemap, is a new one for Quark according to Eric Barnard. "The product runs on Windows and has no particular connection to any other Quark software," Barnard, a program management specialist at the company, said. "It's a standalone product."

Sitemap was designed to separate design, content and management tools, sending those functions to the appropriate person, much the way newspaper publishing systems separate out copy editing, reporting and design functions. "We used to have typing pools, then word processing departments and then we all proved we could type for ourselves," Barnard said. "This is to do the same thing, letting people who need to do a function do it without calling an outside department."

Sitemap is a long way from competing in the market, though, since it is not expected to go to alpha code until later this month.

Off the show floor, quite a few things were happening, some good and some bad, for the purveyors of print.

Everyone, as Quark founder Tim Gill put it, is worshipping at the altar of XML, hoping to find ways to share content, moving it to wherever it can make some money. "On the Web, everyone is a publisher," Gill said. "We can take our content and resell it. We can take others' content and use it where appropriate. XML has simplicity that others don't have to do that."

In that vein, XML standards and proposals for XML standards were popping off like Champagne corks. One, proposed by Adobe, Agfa, Heidelberg and Man Roland, is for a job definition format, or JDF. The JDF combines the attributes of the PDF-based Portable Job Ticket Format (Pjtf) used in the pre-press arena with the Co-operation for Pre-press, Press & Post-press (CIP3) information used to handle cross-departmental information, throwing in connections to a company's business and management systems. Despite all the acronyms and myriad connections, the proposal is to use PDF and XML to make it easier to track from the preproduction stages through post-production, containing information that can be used in press and mailroom setup, specialized delivery such as microzoning and be able to bill appropriately.