[HN Gopher] Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn't Make It (2022)
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Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn't Make It (2022)
Author : rbanffy
Score : 44 points
Date : 2025-07-09 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tedium.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedium.co)
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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!
| com2kid wrote:
| 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.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > 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?
| com2kid wrote:
| 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.
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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).
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| 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.
| jamesbooker83 wrote:
| 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
| masfuerte wrote:
| Was it Xara?
|
| Corel licensed their software for a while and released it as
| CorelXARA.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara
| WillAdams wrote:
| No, not Xara --- I finally managed to remember:
|
| Cerilica (company name) Truism (product name).
| tinier_subsets wrote:
| > 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.
| speterNJdev wrote:
| And don't forget Stone Create
| WillAdams wrote:
| If we mentioned Stone Design Create, then we have to add
| Pages.app by Pages.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| PageMaker was awesome -- and ultimately transformed into InDesign
| which is excellent.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Was it transformed, or replaced by? They were both available
| for some time
| asplake wrote:
| Well I learned that FrameMaker still lives! Takes me back to a
| past life. Who uses it now?
| Finnucane wrote:
| 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.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > I make sad face now.
|
| If only you had said sad Mac
| cormullion wrote:
| Interleaf rose and fell spectacularly. Writing the entire user
| interface code in Common Lisp was an interesting feature.
| lysace wrote:
| 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...
| turnsout wrote:
| TIL that Serif (publisher of the Affinity suite, now owned by
| Canva) has been around since the 90s!
| russellbeattie wrote:
| 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.
| jamesgill wrote:
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| 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)
| wduquette wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| pstuart wrote:
| 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....
| meepmorp wrote:
| Quark is still around.
| ornel wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| leakycap wrote:
| 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)
| egypturnash wrote:
| "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.
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(page generated 2025-07-09 23:00 UTC)