| ▲ | mosura a day ago |
| The reality is DTP outside of pro sectors (i.e. these days InDesign) was rendered worthless by how ubiquitous the tooling was. In any sector where the barriers to entry are destroyed you either have to go really big or go home. |
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| ▲ | WorldMaker 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| A lot of this seems to be related to death of the amateur and semi-pro DTP industries: 1. Printers stopped catering to semi-pros and became more binary between "home" and "enterprise" solutions, with very little crossover and with "home" products trying to be as "good enough" dumb as possible (and also in many cases nearly as hostile to semi-pro usage as possible because so many "home" printers became loss leaders for ink cartridge subscriptions). 2. A lot of DTP moved to web publishing. Who needs printed invites when you have "evites"? Who needs printed greeting cards when you have "ecards" and now Facebook walls and group messaging stickers/gifs/memes? Etc. I have fond memories of the home DTP creative scene in the 1990s. Partly because my mother was deep into it and very creative with it. It is interesting how much has changed between that era (when Publisher was one of several nearly ubiquitous home tools alongside Print Shop) to today (where Print Shop is a dead brand for many years and Publisher has been zombie-like or comatose in the same span, and now scheduled for death). |
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| ▲ | askvictor 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No-one will pay for it, but the presence of Publisher, as a tool that people know and use, in the Office Suite, would probably be a substantial feature for many people. |
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| ▲ | dabockster 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Which is funny because here in Seattle there is starting to be a resurgence of DTP to some degree. But it's very underground and, being already in a tech hub, likely very niche from a macroeconomics viewpoint. |
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| ▲ | dybber a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And for publisher there probably isn’t the same network effect as for Word/Excel/Powerpoint. |
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| ▲ | traceroute66 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | > And for publisher there probably isn’t the same network effect as for Word/Excel/Powerpoint. There isn't because any serious print shop will laugh you out the door if you come to them with a Publisher file. Publisher is fine for home/office printing, and you will probably get away with it at your local corner shop that does digital printing on a Xerox box in the back of the shop. But if you're sending stuff off to the big-boys you will suddenly find yourself needing to adhere to artwork preflight settings, colour profiles, PDF and TAC specs. Not only will the printer give you validation settings files you can load into Acrobat and Indesign, but if there are issues, the printer's preflight team will be more willing (and able !) to help you if you are using industry-standard tools. | | |
| ▲ | Terretta 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | > There isn't because any serious print shop will laugh you out the door if you come to them with a Publisher file. You say this like customers don't show up with a PowerPoint file. | | |
| ▲ | trinix912 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm pretty sure they not only show up with a PowerPoint file, but one with missing/nonembedded fonts, web images, perhaps even a video in there somewhere. At least that's been my experience with people sending me stuff to print. | |
| ▲ | brendoelfrendo 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | When I did IT work for my university, I was in charge of a big plotter printer that the science students used to print posters with summaries of their research for conferences. The only format I ever got was PowerPoint. Based on the number of search results for "powerpoint research poster template", it looks like this PowerPoint is still the format of choice. I never really thought about it, but it is kind of odd that the same community that loves using LaTeX for document formatting and typesetting research papers is also using PowerPoint as a desktop publishing substitute. |
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| ▲ | quietbritishjim a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Sorry but what does this mean? I can't quite parse it. What tooling was ubiquitous? |
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| ▲ | trinix912 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | They probably meant Publisher, which was a part of every more expensive MS Office deal. It was simple to use and much more suitable than Word for simple design jobs (business cards, leaflets, stationary, etc) and with which the "average" MS Office user could now do what was once the domain of DTP "professionals". | | |
| ▲ | mosura 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | I did not mean this. | | |
| ▲ | trinix912 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | So please tell us what you did mean. | | |
| ▲ | mosura 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am perfectly happy with the original statement. | | |
| ▲ | quietbritishjim 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Taken literally, your statement said that [non-pro] DTP died because it had good tooling. I don't know what tooling for DTP is, but it seems unlikely so good that it would kill the software it supports, so your comment seems like nonsense. Why bother posting it if you're perfectly happy with that? The real truth is more boring: DTP didn't die at all, it just merged as a category of software with word processors because computers got powerful enough to run programs with a union of their features. Whether the programs in this new combined category got called one thing or the other mainly depended on their history: Word and InDesign today have a lot more in common with each other than either does with programs from the early 1990s that are nominally in their respective categories. Whatever you were saying, it didn't seem to be that, so it was wrong anyway! But I asked nicely because I was curious if there was some substance there. | | | |
| ▲ | chrisoverzero 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, we don’t mind. Go ahead. |
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