Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn't Make It (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn't Make It (2022)

tedium.co

73 pointsrbanffy73 comments

A few which weren't listed:

- Calamus --- a German tool based on a document model, it was pretty interesting

- Ready-Set-Go --- this was a contender, with a quite vocal fanbase

- Microsoft Publisher --- this was just announced as development ceasing

and the cool British program which did ink mixing and took paper characteristics into account whose name I can't recall.... (and was hoping would be listed)

Kind of silly to list PageMaker, since its successor, K2 became InDesign (which was so promising, Adobe bought Aldus), and Serif Page Plus, since Serif now publishes their Publisher application (fortuitous name choice for them).

Publisher was incredible. I remember using it to make websites - giant imagemaps! - as well as a mock newspaper for our high school that we managed to get in trouble for.

And don't forget Stone Create

If we mentioned Stone Design Create, then we have to add Pages.app by Pages.

EDIT: but Create was more a drawing program than page layout.

Did Pages ever actually ship? I recall Bruce Webster who made a name as an author in the nascent NeXT community of the day stopped writing to pursue Pages.

But I never heard if it ever made it to market or with what feature set.

_NeXT Magazine_ described a DTP publishing package as "in the bag" after Pages by Pages was announced --- it was far enough along that Anderson Financial Services bought it to sell (and also got the afs.com domain name for marketing purposes).

You mention a British program. I do not know about the specific features you mention, but a British company called Serif used to make very highly-regarded DTP software.

I think they were bought by Corel

Edit: Serif are in the article, sorry

> I think they were bought by Corel

Serif (makers of Affinity suite) were bought by Canva last year. So far, they’ve honored their perpetual licenses and still offer them, but it seems like a perilous proposition given Canva’s audience and sales model.

Was it Xara?

Corel licensed their software for a while and released it as CorelXARA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara

No, not Xara --- I finally managed to remember:

Cerilica (company name) Truism (product name).

The last big RISC OS program written in BASIC and assembler. I published something through Cerilica called TextFX, also in BASIC and assembler.

There was also Composition, by a chap from New Zealand. Multiple transparent layers of any size and position, and and interesting system-wide plugin system.

That just makes me sadder that MacBasic wasn't available and more interested in trying RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi....

Never been in that professional area but around 2000 InDesign (on Windows) was probably the 2nd name you had heard after QuarkXPress.

I mean I can't really speak with authority how much that (first IIRC) version of InDesign differed from this K2 or PageMaker but I think it was working well with Photoshop and ImageReady (both of which I knew from work before).

Would probably depend on how much it was more of a v2 or how much was a complete rewrite.

I lived through the whole thing. Aldus Pagemaker was king for a long while, then Quark came along, then Adobe bought Aldus to get their nascent PageMaker replacement (codenamed K2), dethroning Quark.

There were a lot of other programs along the way, esp. if you consider platforms other than Mac OS (and later Windows).

I still think someone needs to create an office suite which just used .md and .csv and similar plain-text source files for file formats, then all design variations are done via theming --- then, when it's time to produce a document professionally, what is provided is a clear plain text file with sensible markup which is easily converted into pretty much anything.

I had an Amiga in high school when my neighbor ahem loaned me his PageSetter disks. It was hard to use in places, and it surely crashed a lot, but I got great grades on the homework I created in it, which often looked nicer than what the school newspaper was able to pull off.

DTP probably doesn't seem like that big of a deal to anyone today outside of a publishing house. It was freaking amazing at the time. Me, some dumb kid with an off the shelf computer, could make reasonably professional (if not exactly elegant) documents just like the news and print people? It seemed unthinkable.

On the Amiga I used Professional Page, which was notable for its support for Agfa Compugraphic scalable fonts.

That was much newer and nicer. It was a great choice!

Reminds me of printing cards at home. Reading, I almost skipped over where this referenced Print Shop, as I didn't recognize the name. Their article for that, https://tedium.co/2016/06/02/the-print-shop-banner-decade/, is ridiculously nostalgic. I think I can hear that main banner printing.

I grew up during the 90s, which was the height of home made greeting cards. Magazines ran huge spreads comparing different programs for how well they could make banners and cards, how good their clip art collection was, and how easy they were to use.

I remember as a kid that making personalized greeting cards was just what you did. I had a computer, I had a color printer, every holiday was getting a unique card! Family events had giant banners that I spend hours taping together. One year I did a space themed banner (I use a "space image" generation program that did stars and nebulas and such) and then realized my mistake when it took forever to print out 15+ sheets of paper with a solid black background (oops).

Nowadays I don't even own a color printer (black and white laser), and I haven't tried making custom cards in forever.

IMHO it is just one more example of how PCs have become content consumption devices rather than outlets for creation.

> IMHO it is just one more example of how PCs have become content consumption devices rather than outlets for creation.

I would argue it’s more of an example of a part of an industry dying because the reality never lived up to the expectations and the individual costs being prohibitive to getting there. As the artwork computers were cable of got better, we weren’t as happy with the quality of image you get from standard printer paper and an inkjet. The difference between photo paper and regular paper in the same printer is night and day, but most people never saw that and most people didn’t want to spend the money that photo paper cost for printing out a single birthday card. Especially when it’s was a 50/50 crapshoot whether your print heads were clogged or would clog half way through and ruin the first print. Add into that the cost of all the ink that was wasted to clean the print heads and the chance that you would just plain be out of a color and unable to print anyway and I think most people just decided the aggravation wasn’t worth the novelty of Clip Art Dog #23 telling you happy birthday.

And then once the internet really took off, who wanted to give a clip art card printed on printer paper when you could send someone a “jibjab” custom e-card with funny animations of your faces?

My old HP 500c was incredibly reliable and it didn't have any of the print head cleaning shenanigans that are needed now days.

It was however dog slow.

I am not sure why modern inkjets need print head cleaning whereas old ones did not.

That old device was 300 or even 150 dpi. The newer devices are 1200 dpi-ish. Smaller hole, more clog.

For greeting cards, 300dpi is fine.

For photos, the paper makes a huge difference, 1200 dpi on cheap paper is trash, 600 DPI on high quality photo paper looks good.

In the race for bigger numbers we lost out on reliability so now we have nothing. :/

Also doing banners to hang up, in MS-DOS with a program I no longer recall the name, it had several fonts and funky layouts to chose from.

Then we would print them into a dot matrix printer, take the dotted sides from the pages out and hang the whole thing.

Searching on the Web, it might have been Banner Mania, but I am not sure.

I still remember how to do the quad fold so that the printed card actually looked like a card

I remember Publish It for the Apple //e. It was unbelievably good for a 1 MHz CPU. And the print quality on a dot matrix was also impressively good (even though it didn’t use the maximum possible 244 dpi my printer had)

We have to cut some slack for the titles from platforms that died - it wasn’t completely their fault at least.

I confess complete bewilderment that Print Shop is still around! It is called out for not being on the main list because it is still selling. Holy crap!

I was hoping to find a Mac program we used to have called ReadySetGo by Letraset. It was a surprisingly capable DTP program published by a company known for its dry transfer lettering sheets. I wonder if anyone else remembers it!

My family must have bought it because they used to run a very small town newspaper, but I guess maybe given that they didn't own a LaserWriter, just an ImageWriter, and didn't have a pathway to get whole laid-out pages of the newspaper to the printer digitally, they decided it was better to just keep using MacWrite, write everything in a narrow column width, print it out on the ImageWriter, and cut it up to lay out the newspaper on big sheets of paper.

We used that for our Macintosh user group newsletter in college. It was one of the earliest of the new DTP industry tools.

PageMaker was enormously popular in the 80s/90s. It was everywhere. I remember writing two different sets of computer manuals with it.

I also used GeoPublish, because Commodore! It was fantastic on the C64.

GeoPublish was part of GEOS which is an also-ran OS from early days of graphical computing. I personally used it for home compute as a kid; coming from a Kaypro it was pretty wild.

Former CEO of GeoWorks claims that GEOS faded away "because Microsoft threatened to withdraw supply of MS-DOS to hardware manufacturers who bundled Geoworks with their machines".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)

> because Microsoft threatened to withdraw supply of MS-DOS

That was a very Microsoft thing to do. They are much nicer nowadays, but back then and when they tried everything to delay FLOSS adoption (with friends we joked they’d eventually kidnap us), they gave me a lot of trouble.

Yes, for a while we used it for our university reports, much better than fighting layouts with Word, and we weren't LaTeX fans.

I only had a single professor where doing reports with LaTeX was a thing.

This takes me back. It's missing Quark XPress.

Around that time I was dating a typesetter who did DTP as well, and I got into the game and did gigs using Quark, Ventura Publisher, and Pagemaker. Good times!

Amusingly enough, Word 4.0 on the Mac had enough layout capabilities to do a lot of basic publishing needs.

All these many years later I can ace those online kerning tests....

Quark is still around.

But it is a vestige of its former self, largely due to the way it treated it's customers with contempt. I remember managing a newsroom with about 20 computers running Quark 3.5 or something. Needed to add one additional Mac and only 3.5.1 was available - of course it wasn't compatible with 3.5 which meant we had to pay £££ for each machine to upgrade .1

Annoying company.

When Indesign came along people were almost gleeful to jump ship

"5. The Newsroom. Platform: Apple II, IBM PC"

shows a distinctly c64-looking splash screen

Wikipedia says it was for Apple ][, MS-DOS, C64, and Atari 8-bits. The first two came out in 1984, the c64 and Atari ports followed in 1985/7.

anyway, now I'm having flashbacks to meticulously pushing pixels in The Print Shop to make an image of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs to use in greeting cards and tractor-feed banners.

We used this application in a middle school English class I had. It was very fun even if not the most powerful application. IIRC, each page was broken up into six segments. If your article was longer than one segment you had to save two files. If changes made in segment 1 spilled over into segment 2, you had to redraft two files. fun times!

That's amazingly inconvenient. Wow.

I rarely see mention of UniQorn, a DTP app based on Apple's short-lived QuickDraw GX graphics engine.

Some portions of UniQorn lived on in Softpress Freeway web design app that was on shelves in boxes in Apple stores for many years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_(software)

PFS:First Publisher was my fav for a while in the 80s on a clone 8086 PC with CGA (running in mono 640x200). Very impressive performance for the time.

It supported loading MacPaint bitmaps (.mac on the PC) and with the “cheap” PC compatibles it made for a poor man’s Mac-workalike DTP tool.

Here’s an 1988 article on the T/Maker company that built it, founded by Heidi Roizen and her brother Peter Roizen:

https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/tmaker-tiny-so...

The "Sirius microcomputer" pictured as "The Book Machine" is in fact a Victor 9000, as you can see in the picture. The same unit was branded as "Sirius" in Europe and as "Victor 9000" in the U.S.

I spent quite a lot of time with the Victor 9000 in 1983-1985, as my college bought a bunch of them, and I was the student computer lab guy who supported them. It was a fascinating machine with some really cool specs: built-in 800x600 pixel monochrome graphics, redefinable keyboard and character set layouts, built-in serial and parallel ports, high-density floppy drives, and an 8086 processor. It ran CP/M-86 and MS-DOS. Its closest competitor was the original IBM PC, which at that time had low-density floppies, no graphics, no built-in ports, etc.

The downfall of the Victor 9000 was that it pre-dated the rise of the "PC-clone": third-party PCs that could run exactly the same shrink-wrapped software as the IBM PC did. In the CP/M-80 8-bit world, every manufacturer had its own disk formats, screen sizes, and so on, and you had to buy shrink-wrapped software for your own specific hardware, and the Victor-9000 folks assumed that the 16-bit world would work the same way. As a result, they produced a much better machine than the IBM PC...that wasn't fully compatible.

Also available on that machine was a…um…pointing pen peripheral.

Essentially it work like a light pen, but it used a mesh that was, somehow, affixed to the screen.

We had a Victor 9000 connected to a plotter along with very early AutoCAD. I also think we had another digitizer connected as well.

A very cool application was one of the engineers was using that along with AutoCAD to digitize aircraft from photocopies out of Jane’s books. He was using the data to calculate radar cross sections of the different airplanes.

Just a bunch of lines in the screen, he just wanted the points. Thought that was pretty clever.

Victor was also co-founded by former MOS Technologies people, including Chuck Peddle, one of the key people behind the 6502 CPU, and Commodore's earliest computers.

Interleaf rose and fell spectacularly. Writing the entire user interface code in Common Lisp was an interesting feature.

PageMaker was awesome -- and ultimately transformed into InDesign which is excellent.

Was it transformed, or replaced by? They were both available for some time

Replaced by - I misspoke when I wrote "transformed". It was a precursor to InDesign; Adobe bought Aldus and PageMaker with it, and eventually dropped it in favor of InDesign. You're right that they both co-existed. I used both extensively back in the day (along with Quark for a while).

I dislike what Adobe has become with its CC crap, but InDesign was a masterpiece of software. (I say "was" as I stopped doing page/graphic design 15 years ago, and unfamiliar with today's offerings).

My impression back then was that InDesign was created to match the workflows from Quark, which were popular in magazines. PageMaker was more at home when page setting books and publications with more consistent formatting across pages.

As I recall, InDesign essentially combined the single-page design focus of Quark with the multi-page design focus of PageMaker, to create an app that did both quite well.

This missed one of the most badly named applications ever made: "Publish It!" It wasn't bad for an Apple II program, but say the name out loud to see why it's not a surprise that it is lost to history.

It was a brilliant app for the //e and later machines. Would use extra memory and was unbelievably fast for a 1 MHz CPU.

Sadly, its name makes it Google-proof.

It's surprisingly not that hard to find if you put it in quotes. I just looked now to take a trip down memory lane. I even found images of the original disk!

Ready for this: A full-powered desktop publishing system for the IIe which included a custom Mac-like GUI: 140KB.

Unbelievable. Additional disks had fonts, clip art and printer drivers. But the main app was insanely small. It really was brilliant.

I looked for images in the Internet Archive without success. Those images might need to be uploaded then.

This is what I had found:

https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/images/pr...

;)

There was a similarly named program originally known in the UK as Timeworks Publisher. GEM-based though, hmm.

Aldus PageMaker is considered a failure! I thought it was neck-in-neck competition with QuarkXPress. I was good with PageMaker. Well, I can make it sing.

PageMaker and CorelDRAW paid for my high school and college education, and almost all of my earnings at that time. I wanted to try QuarkXPress, but I had never seen a Mac before I moved away from my hometown.

> Aldus PageMaker is considered a failure!

Only by this author. Adobe killed it 5 years after introducing their "Quark killer" InDesign (still sold today), having let it languish for several years before that. PageMaker was professional desktop publishing's killer app for some time.

My father set up a Ventura Publisher-based publishing shop in the 80s and it was great. I got to use a laser printer for the first time, retouch photos with Corel Paint and play around with GEM, which I remember had an extremely smooth mouse pointer. All in glorious high resolution (720x348) gray scale.

TIL that Serif (publisher of the Affinity suite, now owned by Canva) has been around since the 90s!

I've got a bunch of artistic side projects and regularly need DTP.

I switched to Linux a few years back, and pretty much the last remaining pain point is DTP software. Is there anything out there in the FOSS world at a similar level to Affinity? I'm yet to find anything.

I know there are approaches through Wine, but a native solution would be ideal.

Your thoughts on scribus?

https://www.scribus.net/

I am not in the industry and am unqualified to comment on it's qualifications. But it does appear to be trying to be a professional sort of DTP.

Yeah, I didn't enjoy Scribus. Horrible UX, which probably has its roots in "professional" DTP from the nineties. Like, one does not simply just paste an image into Scribus.

I'm sure it's possible to do plenty with it, but it doesn't make things easy. Something I really miss from Affinity, for example, was the Artistic Text tool, which made it easy to fit text to arbitrary heights and widths -- think the Run DMC logo.

Ok, it's not open source, but it's cheap: https://www.pagestream.org/?action=Store

I'd have to do some reading around, but from first glance it doesn't look like it'd compare well to Affinity.

Not free, but maybe you can try VivaDesigner: https://viva.systems/designer/

I never tried it myself, since Scribus is good enough for me...

Cheers, I'll check it out

Surprised to see lighthouse designs software or STONEworks didn't make the cut. I realize the list stops in the early 90s, but both of these tools were rather significant if you used NeXT or early versions of Mac OS X. Hell, Diagram! lives on today as OmniGraffle, which is my favorite diagramming tool still

Well I learned that FrameMaker still lives! Takes me back to a past life. Who uses it now?

Not me, sadly. I used it a lot back in ye olde dayes, but when Adobe killed the Mac version I had to give it up. I have not forgiven them for this. And now it is subscription only, and separate from CS. I make sad face now.

Same here! We used it - on Solaris! - for document preparation at work. I have to admit that preparing and pasting graphics into Word with Visio is better than the FM graphics editor, but OMG, I wish I had that table tool back compared to the abomination in MS Word.

Used it back in the early 2000s to write seriously large manuals. It was essential if you were in an industry that thought SGML was the future...but in all fairness, FM rocked at large multi-piece documents at a time when both Word and WordPerfect would have crashed at the sight.

> I make sad face now.

If only you had said sad Mac

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