Tom Arah looks at the surprising history of professional desktop publishing and the current state of play.

The generally-accepted wisdom is that desktop publishing (DTP) was invented by Steve Jobs and Apple with the launch of the Apple Mac in 1984. It’s certainly true that the Mac’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) enabled bitmapped fonts, images and layouts to be both viewed onscreen and printed – a whole new world compared to character-based PC systems.

However the received wisdom is wrong on at least two counts. To begin with, the real credit for the WIMP (Windows Icon Menus Pointer) interface and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) computing belongs to earlier pioneers such as Doug Engelbart who invented the mouse and especially to the researchers working on the extraordinary Xerox Alto and Xerox Star systems at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) during the 1970s. Apple’s genius was to take these ideas mainstream and to use them to create a user-friendly personal computer.

1984’s Apple Mac broke the mould of computing and made DTP possible

At launch the Mac was certainly friendly but it was by no means a platform for serious DTP. Yes, using MacWrite you could mix graphics and text and see fonts onscreen much as they would print but the choice of faces was limited to just nine bitmapped fonts at six different point sizes and in five different styles (including typographically dreadful outline and shadow options). More importantly, anyone using the low resolution 72-dpi dot matrix ImageWriter would hardly have thought that the existing publishing industry was about to be revolutionized. In fact a PC connected to a daisywheel printer produced far more professional results!
What enabled the Apple Mac to transform itself from expensive executive toy into publishing power house was the launch of Adobe PostScript in 1985. Adobe was set up by John Warnock and Chuck Geschke two developers from Xerox PARC and PostScript was their rewrite of the InterPress project that they had worked on. PostScript was a Page Description Language (PDL) that described the layout of each page and the actual fonts used programmatically in terms of vectors. Crucially this meant that any application on any platform could output a PostScript print file that could then be sent to any supporting device so providing instant platform-, software-, device- and resolution-independence.