DTP Coursebook

Desktop publishing began in 1983 with a program developed by James Bessen at a community newspaper in Philadelphia. That program, Type Processor One, ran on an IBM PC using a Hercules Graphics Card for a WYSIWYG display and was offered commercially by Bestinfo in 1984. (Desktop typesetting, with only limited page makeup facilities, had arrived in 1978–9 with the introduction of TeX, and was extended in the early 1980s by LaTeX.) The DTP market exploded in 1985 with the introduction in January of the Apple Laser Writer printer, and later in July with the introduction of PageMaker software from Aldus which rapidly became the DTP industry standard software. Before the advent of desktop publishing, the only option available to most persons for producing typed (as opposed to handwritten) documents was a typewriter, which offered only a handful of typefaces (usually fixed-width) and one or two font sizes. This book covers the whole groundwork for this course.