The impact of technology on publishing through the ages to you
Authors: Diana Patterson
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th annual international conference on Systems documentation (1986)

This paper presents various technological developments from the Rosetta Stone to the Apple MacIntosh Computer. With the advent of each change the quality of the product decays significantly, and is only restored to something near the glory of the past after a long period requiring much creative endeavor. This paper was presented as a slide presentation with extemporaneous comments. Let me remind you that you are a publisher. Whether you publish only within your corporation, or to a larger market, you are disseminating information relating to computer software. You may publish on paper, in the usual sort of user's guide or procedure manual, or you may publish online in the form of help screen data dictionaries, or video text. You may be publishing conference notices, newsletters, and memos. All of these are publishing activities, and as a publisher you should be aware of publishing technology and its impact on your readers. Let me also remind you that &ldquo;technology&rdquo; did not spring up 10 years ago, or with the advent of the Twentieth century, or even with the industrial revolution. Technology is, after all, a word derived from the ancient Greek techne, meaning art or skill, and logia, meaning study or science. Further, computer technology did not spring up fully grown, like Athena from the head of Zeus, despite the implications of computer salesmen. Computer technology is just one more step in the history of ideas. It is not necessarily the pinnacle of that history either. Look at the average piece of paper that crosses your desk. More than likely, it comes from a word processing system. You are probably happy with it because it was bold face as required. Fancy formats to accommodate illustrations were no trouble. Even graphic enhancement of the Pharaoh's face was part of the job, if requested. The advent of papyrus, a less durable, but lighter writing medium than stone, created the word processing pool. In the scriptorium, Egyptian artists would make copies of the original texts, probably personalized for the class of audience, so that, while the papyrus could not be posted for long in the market square for all to see, copies could be sent by runner to a wider range of villages for more people to read. The problem with the papyrus technology was the limited supply of papyrus. It did not grow in cooler climates where civilization seems to have crept. Thus developed the parchment technology. Parchment is made from split and pounded sheep skin. For large documents, such as maps, the whole sheep skin was stretched on a rack, rather like an embroidery frame, or drum surface, and the colours and inks were applied while the surface was taut. For the more ordinary reading material, the skins were sewn together, and cut into long narrow, continuous forms, and stored on sticks, forming scrolls, or volumes. The advantages and disadvantages of the scroll format are known to many computer users. Eventually the scroll format was replaced with a side-ways columnar format, rather more like the &ldquo;screen-full&rdquo; of text used by many computer systems. The next advance was to fold the scroll side-ways to create pages with a column on each surface. This developed into the book, or &ldquo;codex&rdquo;, that valuable random-access storage system for information which was such an improvement over the sequential system. With the advent of the page, came the possibility of the index. The codex was a Roman invention, but the index is still not used in a great number of books. The medieval codex contains a spectacular use of ink, and pigment technology, combined with the surfacing technology of the parchment. After more than a thousand years pages are still white, with easy to generate, and compared to a manual typewriter, the result probably looks pretty good. The proceeding paper that you are reading is not the better sort of computer output&mdash;quite deliverately so, but it is pretty usual, and considered acceptable. Look at the average computer screen that you use. It is usually over-crowded, backlit in green, white, or amber. The lettering is often terribly distorted monospaced type which is very hard to read for hours on end. In fact, we don't usually read screens, we recognize patterns on them. These pieces of paper, and these screens are the signs of our advanced technology. Now I am going to ask you to consider the technological changes that have preceded the usual paper manuals and screens that we use in our offices: before Macdraw before Macwrite in &ldquo;Old English&rdquo;; before all those computer graphics posters, and colour graphics terminals. The first publishing technology I want you to consider is the Rosetta Stone. Next time you are in the British Museum take another look at this monumental tribute to publishing. The Rosetta Stone is a multilingual document, in clear, proportionally-spaced type. There was only one, but it was a published document because it was placed in a public place as part of a large edifice, and therefore everyone of any importance would visit this place and have a chance to read it in the language of his choice. The next important technological change in publishing came with the development of papyrus as a writing surface. This was not an overnight success, I'm sure. It must have taken a long time to develop the right sort of combination of surface and inks to produce the types of papyrus documents we have preserved. They have drawings in colour which accompany the text, usually written in columnar form, in a good clear lettering, proportionally spaced, and still legible, and flexible after 5-10 millennia. Print-outs were available in full colour, with multi-colour texts, variable fonts, and brilliant, full colour illustrations. Texts are proportionally spaced, there are multi-lingual pages with varying column widths to suit the needs of the translator or commentator. Very often the texts are justified to both left and right margins, with column balancing as required, and specially tailored illustrations. Ornamental headings and first letters of text include references to the owner of the book, so that the illustration of a man's book would include his coat of arms, or his name, so that his copy was not like any other. There are texts of this technology created as special graphical jokes, or multi-media presentations, e.g., the parable of the loaves and fishes written in the shape of two very realistic fishes with the words forming the scales. There is a story of an ostrich with the text circling around until is runs into the bird's neck, and thus into the ground. Changing fonts seems to have been no trouble: Greek and Latin, French and German can appear on a single page, in large and small type, with bold face, italic, and illumination. Even the length of dashes can be altered especially to justify the lines. Mixing red and black inks on the same page did not even take a special press run. It was all part of the page if you desired it. The next technological advance of real note was Gutenberg's movable type which could be put into a press to allow many copies of a text to be produced with a total reduction in time. Gutenberg's first type was carved hardwood, which would deteriorate after a few books. So while the Bible he printed looked like the best handwriting of the day (German style handwriting, or &ldquo;black letter&rdquo; which the layman calls &ldquo;Old English&rdquo;). The advantage of Gutenberg's contribution was a lessening of costs of books, and the proliferation of important texts. The disadvantage was that the printing process was only an improvement in the printing of the text, or in specially carved wood block pictures. The paintings that could be done in many colours disappeared, because these paints did not work in a printing press which required ink. There were some attempts at hand-colouring pictures whose outlines had been done on the press, but these soon stopped. This phenomenon is symptomatic of technological advancement. Once we think that we have achieved a method that takes less time, we resent mixing the old technology with the new. I have seen it in the computer age quite strongly. Our printing process is now nearly universally offset printing rather than Gutenberg's letterpress. We can photographically reproduce any drawing, in colour or black and white. But the computerized publisher seems to resent mixing the computer-generated letters with hand drawings, because somehow, if you cannot do the whole business on computer, you are losing some of the advantage of the technological advance. The hell with the way it looks. The feeling among these people seems to be that it is better to have boxes made out of dashes and vertical bars than a hand drawing with some rounded corners to indicate a screen or keys on the keyboard. In just such a way the hand painting of printed black and white line drawing was left undone, and we lost colour in book illustration for about 500 years. Even when it was finally re-introduce d, the pictures and text were never integrated as they has been in the manuscript days, and now pictures go in blocks, or pages especially set aside for doing screened black and white photos, line drawings, or full colour separations. It took about 300 hundred years for the quality of printing to come into its own, with the progressive simplification of type making it clear, clean, and legible, and sufficiently flexible to allow for the fish jokes of yesteryear. And at about the same time there was another technological change that put the quality of texts back into the stone age. That invention was the typewriter. There is no doubt that the typewriter was a wonderful tool, replacing wax tables, paper notes, and eventually, writings with small circulation (meaning the circulation of the number of carbons that could be forced into the typewriter). The quality of the result was abysmal compared to typeset texts, but the convenience of the transcription by skilled scribes, allowed people to overlook the poor quality. It was 50 to 75 years before typewriters became advanced enough to even-up the darkness of the letters, and eventually produce a sharp image. Another ten years passed before it became possible to get crisp letters with film ribbons, and then proportionally spaced type. There are a few other technological changes about this time which provided even worse images, such as court-stenographic machines and calculators, but we will skip rapidly over them once you have a picture of that style of output in your mind. Now we come to the advance that you have been waiting for: the computer revolution. The first computer printing is much older than the micro-computer, and was in all uppercase, with bad inking, and often type that varied in position in two directions: it was out of line both up and down, and side to side. But with the introduction of the microcomputer, and the recognition of word processing as a worthwhile activity for a computer, the quality of type has gone up. There are computerized typesetters, which create text about as nice as type done in the 18th century. It is not as nice as the monotype of the 20th century, but not as bad as the cheap type of the 19th century. There is typewriter quality output&mdash;known as &ldquo;letter quality&rdquo;&mdash;which looks like the best typewriters because it uses exactly the same mechanism. And at the lower end there are several varieties of type created with dots. The 300 dot per inch laser printer looks like Gutenberg operating on some old type, but because it is in a Times Roman face, it is considered much better than the unpretentious letter quality monospaced type. Then, horror of horrors, there is enlarged Mactype, which looks like it was cut out of felt with pinking shears in any cookie-cutter shape from black letter to Helvetica. It's so much worse than anything ever produced before in the history of publishing, that I cannot understand why anyone thinks that this was a technological advance. Then there is the dot-matrix printer, which is ineffable. I cannot give you the impression that I am a Luddite, because I have produced this paper using a word processing system on the ineffable printer. What I am trying to tell you is that there is still much work to be done to achieve the quality that computer publishing may achieve. But frankly this technological advance may be easy, but it's not good quality. Consider some of the achievements of the past, when people were trying to prove what they could do by hand, and work toward hose goals in beauty of design, legibility, and appropriateness. Do not let anyone tell you that civilization began in 1949 with the invention of the digital computer. Louis XIV was rather more civilized than you or I will ever be.