The future of printing - Magazines in the Year 2012 - Industry Overview

Ten years ago at a printing trade show in a major American city, a bikini-clad woman hand-processed a new kind of lithographic printing plate at the bottom of a large aquarium, cheered on by hundreds of excited attendees. The act was meant to dramatize the water-solubility of the new printing plate, which required no special processing chemistry. Unfortunately, the plate was never accepted by the lithographic industry because it did not work so well when processed in a factory setting by fully-clothed, semi-skilled union workers.

The printing industry has grown up a lot in the past decade. The innocence of earlier times has given way to skepticism and a serious need for real information. The fashion models at the trade shows have largely been replaced by engineers and scientists, and the industry has itself been thrown into a gigantic transparent fish tank - with everyone watching and nowhere to hide.

A new partnership is emerging between publishers and printers as publishers gain control over an increasing portion of pre-press production work with their Macintoshes and other microcomputer-based platforms. Typography and page layout were the first frontiers to be conquered. Color will be next, although progress on this front has been temporarily stalled because the experts are still squabbling over the best way to represent color pictures in digital form, and because too many people have taken the term "WYSIWYG" literally, believing that color monitors must be meticulously calibrated before they can accurately preview the appearance of the final output.

Contrary to the idea of WYSIWYG, it is not really what is seen on a monitor that is so important, but what is expected as a result of seeing it. Type seen on a computer monitor is an extremely low-resolution image in relation to what will actually print. Yet we feel quite comfortable calling it WYSIWYG. That's because we trust that no matter how crudely the type may appear on the computer monitor, it will look beautiful when it comes out of the imagesetter.

Great expectations

A similar "leap of faith" is about to occur in the domain of color. Rather than expecting the computer monitor to reveal exactly how the output will appear, we will rely on the monitor to show us enough of the right kind of information so that we will know exactly what to expect in the final print. Contract-quality direct digital color proofing will make it possible to simulate appearance of the printed page accurately before films or plates are made. The next generation of color technology will allow us to work with color images as confidently as we now work with type.

For all this to happen, a device-independent interchange standard for digital color image representation is needed. There are several representation schemes currently in use. It is probable that one will emerge as the accepted format within the next year or two. Once such a standard is in place, the industry will need a standard to capture the color reproduction characteristics of a printing process so that an application program can prepare data files that are properly calibrated for that process. This program should be completely transparent to the application user. Nobody wants to have to worry about dot-gain curves and process-color ink gamuts if they don't have to.

The progress of data format standards for the graphic-arts industry will drive the evolution of the new partnership between printers and their clients. PostScript allows information about page geometry and typography to be easily specified in final form by the client. But the current generation of PostScript technology falls short of being an ideal medium for conveying the full range of effects that a client is likely to want. Most of these shortcomings will disappear in the next five years. In the meantime, many printers will respond to the desires of their clients to do an increasing share of the production work by instituting programs and services to teach them how to make the best use of the new technology. This activity will become increasingly important as the printer and publisher work together to fine-tune the extended process.

Diversified services

Many publication printers are beginning to provide information-conversion services that go well beyond the traditional medium of print. Just as some color separators have begun to offer image-bank services to their clients, maintaining large data-bases of scanned images for re-use, some printers are diversifying to include electronic products. Some of the larger printers are well-advanced in these new lines of business, taking input from their clients in structured, tagged file formats, and producing products ranging from printed journals to hypertext applications and online database services.

Within the next decade, printers will be receiving electronic files from their clients containing all the information needed to go directly to press. Much of what is currently done manually, such as image-carrier preparation, press makeready and press control, will be automated. This will significantly reduce the front-end costs in the printing process, allowing shorter runs and increased variability within a run, creating new opportunities for printers to work with publishers to reduce turnaround times, and greatly improving the accuracy of their audience targeting.

Printers will also play an important role in finishing and distribution. The larger printers who can afford to acquire the necessary technology will offer their clients increasingly sophisticated labeling, packaging and private shipping services. Publications of every size will benefit from these new technological capabilities.

The future of printing will be as an integrated manufacturing process where data files supplied by print buyers over high-speed communications links will be intelligently routed for the most appropriate method of graphic reproduction or digital processing to meet the buyer's needs for quantity, quality and utility. The printer's role will be to process the data files and manufacture a variety of products to meet and hopefully exceed the highly specialized requirements of each client.

Compared to trade shows featuring bathing beauties swimming around in fish tanks, the automated printing plant of the future may not draw as large and excited a crowd, but it will surely be more worthy of the price of admission.

Printer projections

Folio: asked a number of magazine printers what would be the most significant relationship over the next 20 years. Here are a few of their responses.

More and ore printers will become "one-stop shops" for publishers, as electronic publishing systems advance in both use and ease of operation. As publishers scanning and electronic publishing, their experience in use and acceptable quality control of "commodity color" will also increase. The $10 separation will be here sooner than anyone thinks.

As publishers compete for advertising dollars, a filmless editorial close will merge with "cost-effective" geographic/demographic issues to gain new readers and keep advertisers focused on their targeted audience. On-line technology will link the printer to assist the magazine with late closing ads, more placement versatility for their agency clients and editorial selectivity o well-defined subscriber groups.

Publishers can no longer rely on a printer who merely takes orders. They need a printer who can bring order to the creative and production process. Printers will not only provide technology, they will show publishers ll e creative possibilities that technology offers.

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