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In the early 1980s, letters rasterized from outline fonts at low and medium resolutions had irregular shapes. The lower the resolutions, the greater the irregularities, and the more that typographers criticized the type quality. PostScript fonts, launched in 1985, regularized medium resolution type with secret ingredients coyly called “hints” by Adobe. This prompted competing inventions of font regularization using techniques variously called “instructions,” “delta exceptions,” “procedures,” “intelligence,” and other terms sounding more like hi-tech snake oil than science. Further research and open publication, however, revealed their connections to traditional aesthetics of letter symmetry as well as to modern signal processing, pattern recognition, and psychophysics, thus expanding our understanding of typography in digital culture.

Presents an interview conducted with Larry Bohn of Interlewaf. This company was founded in 1981 and was acquired by Broadvision in 2000. Larry Bohn was with Interleaf in 1986–1993, serving in a variety of senior management positions. This interview took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 24, 2019, at his place of work, General Catalyst.

INTERLEAF, INC., was an early entry into the computer-based publishing business, initially based on computer workstations and focusing on technical publishing. The company was formed in 1981, shipped its fi rst product in 1984, which included a variety of hardware and software innovations, and was in a strong position to go public in 1986. In the later 1980s, other companies entered the business in competition with Interleaf, and personal computers then had the power that once required an expensive workstation; there was also standardization around window systems such as the X Window System, Motif on top of X, and Microsoft Windows. Also some of Interleaf's innovations were no longer competitive advantages as the industry coalesced around alternative technologies such as PostScript and Acrobat Reader. Redirecting its business strategy once and then again, Interleaf continued on with up and down success until 2000 when it was acquired by Broad Vision.

Presents an interview conducted with Liz Bond Crews. Crews began her career as a systems analyst in Los Angeles, CA, USA, for RCA. She soon joined the Xerox Electro-Optical Division in Pasadena, CA, where she led a group building special systems for National Geographic magazine, Ginn & Company, and University Microfilm. In her final position at Xerox, she licensed high-quality typeface designs from Mergenthaler Linotype, among others, for use on Xerox’s high-performance 9700 laser printer. In the early 1980s, the Adobe cofounder John Warnock recruited Crews to Adobe Systems, where her first task was to license high-quality typeface designs to be rendered as Adobe Type 1 fonts for PostScript printers. While at Adobe, she was responsible for bringing high-quality typography to the Adobe PostScript pagedescription language, running corporate marketing, hiring graphics designers, and putting Adobe on a firm footing with professional designers and printers, greatly enhancing the value of their product. After Adobe, she helped found Electronics for Imaging and, after some consulting, retired in 1993.

The Font Wars were a decades-long competition in the computer industry for dominance in font technology, viewed as a key success factor for personal computing platforms. The Font Wars spurred innovative scientific research into the small, nearly subliminal forms of the printed letters on which modern civilization was based, yet which had received little scrutiny outside the printing trades. More than a business episode, the Font Wars were above all a manifestation and translation of ideas—some modern, some ancient, some theoretical, some practical—into computer software and hardware. At the heart of the Font Wars was a fundamental question: What is the best way to turn traditional printed letter forms into digital fonts for computer screens and printers? Answers to this question were researched, implemented, and launched into the marketplace, where their intense competition transformed the 500 year tradition of printing and publishing, placing the electronic literacy on the screens of billions of digital displays, computers, tablets, and smart phones around the world.

In 1985, Apple was in crisis and Macintosh and LaserWriter sales were plummeting. Marketing manager John Scull was tasked with saving the LaserWriter. Despite having no staff and facing resistance, Scull marshaled allies across Apple's sales and marketing organizations, its dealer channel, and third-party partners like Aldus and Adobe in order to launch a successful desktop publishing marketing program. By 1988, desktop publishing at Apple had become a $1 billion business.

Presents an interview conducted with Tim Gill. Gill is the creator of the QuarkXPress desktop publishing software, and the founder of Quark, Inc. Gill was active in Quark right from its founding in 1981 until 2000, during which time QuarkXPress enjoyed significant market success and a devoted following.

Ventura Publisher was the first desktop publishing software package to run on IBM PC compatible computers. Developed in the mid-1980s, Ventura was also the first desktop publishing application to incorporate features such as style sheets and automatic page layouts, allowing for long document formatting. This paper provides an autobiographical sketch of Lee Lorenzen, one of the founders of Ventura Software and developers of Ventura Publisher. Lorenzen outlines his early career in software and the founding story of Ventura Software and their innovative application. He also describes the early competitive landscape in desktop publishing software, including Aldus PageMaker, and then contrasts it with the key long document publishing features of Ventura Publisher such as style sheets, fast hyphenation and justification, automated layout algorithms, and database publishing.

In the 1960s, John and Jonathan Seybold founded and ran the pioneering computer typesetting company Rocappi. In 1971, they started the Seybold Report, which had a major role in guiding the computer transformation of publishing that took place in that decade. In 1981, Jonathan started the companion company, Seybold Seminars, to conduct conferences and (later) exhibitions, which facilitated the even broader revolutions in computing and publishing in the 1980s and 1990s.

The term, "desktop publishing," is commonly attributed to Paul Brainerd. With the introduction of PageMaker software in 1985, Brainerd, founder and CEO of Aldus Corporation, contributed to a revolution in the design and production of documents. Using a relatively affordable suite of off-the-shelf hardware and software products, people at large and small businesses, schools, churches, and nonprofits as well as graphics professionals could now produce and print newsletters, flyers, and brochures quickly, easily, and at a much lower cost than traditionally produced documents. The first element necessary for desktop publishing was the graphical user interface (GUI) introduced to the general PC market with Apple's Macintosh in 1984. The GUI made it possible to design pictures and document layout on screen in a visual or what-you-see-is-what-you get (WYSIWYG) way.

Founded in 1982, Adobe Systems heralded several of the technological innovations necessary to precipitate the emergence of desktop publishing as well as many features of modern office computing, digital media, and graphic arts. In this paper, Adobe founders Charles Geschke and John Warnock cover their professional history, the conception of Adobe Systems, and its growth. They also explain the technology behind the advances in computer printing, electronic file transfer, and digital art and photography. Adobe, its products, and its engineers played a key role in these developments, which enabled desktop publishing and the publishing revolution.

Donald Knuth began the development of TeX in 1977 and had an initial version running in 1978, with the aim of typesetting mathematical documents with the highest quality and with archival reproducibility far into the future. Its usage spread and today the TeX system remains in use by a vibrant user community. However, the world of TeX has always been somewhat out of sync with the commercial desktop publishing systems that began to come out in the mid-1980s, and are now ubiquitous in the worlds of publishing and printing.

The first major computer graphics text, Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics, 1 was inspired by a course, a research project, and a set of notes, all by Ivan Sutherland. In 1971, William Newman invited me to join forces to supplement his partial book draft with notes I had been writing. The book, which appeared in 1973, was received well, exceeding the sales projections of its publisher, McGraw-Hill. Between 1973 and 1977, William and I were research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) working on tools for an “office of the future,” focusing especially on interactive graphics and raster printing. We realized that raster displays and printers would soon dominate and would require mastering new techniques and adapting old ones. The second edition of our book, a complete rewrite, introduced some of the new technologies. This note is a story of the writing of the two editions of the book and it is also a story about how the editions were published in the era before commercial desktop publishing systems. In both the cases, we exploited and adapted computer tools of the time to do much of the publishing ourselves. For the second edition, we chose to use the illustration and printing tools we had developed at PARC to produce camera-ready copy. Especially significant was the use of the Press file format, an early page description language, to combine onto each page the various separate components prepared by different composition tools.

Charles Bigelows career parallels the development of digital font technology. He has designed fonts and consulted about font technology to many of the companies that created desktop publishing systems. He has also written extensively on digital font technology and taught at RISD, Stanford, and RIT.

Several word processing and desktop publishing innovations grew out of 1970s research by Larry Tesler and his collaborators at Stanford and Xerox PARC. One prototype was PUB, a markup language for print publishing. Another was Gypsy, a text editor with a cut/copy/paste command suite that became the de facto standard in desktop publishing and most other applications.

Donald Knuth began the development of TeX in 1977 and had an initial version running in 1978, with the aim of typesetting mathematical documents with the highest quality, and with archival reproducibility far into the future. Its usage spread, and today the TeX system remains in use by a vibrant user community. However, the world of TeX has always been somewhat out of sync with the commercial desktop publishing systems that began to come out in the mid-1980s and are now ubiquitous in the worlds of publishing and printing.

In this issue of the Annals, we have two Anecdotes on the history of Atex, an early innovator in newspapers and magazines converting to digital operation. The first anecdote is by co-founder Douglas Drane. This anecdote provides more information about Atexs history.

Douglas Drane was one of three co-founders of Atex, an early dominant supplier of digital systems for newspaper and magazine publication. Drane recounts his memories of Atexs founding and operation until it was bought by Kodak.

Guest editors Burton Grad and David Hemmendinger discuss the History of Desktop Publishing, Part 1 issue.

In 1963, John Seybold started the company Rocappi to use computer technology to produce and typeset complex, high-quality books, catalogs, directories, manuals, magazines, and other typeset documents. Over the next seven years, with the participation of his son, Jonathan W. Seybold, Rocappi pioneered the use of computers for publishing.

Introduced by Adobe Systems in 1984, PostScript was a unique device-independent approach to describing the appearance of a printed page, for the first time allowing pages to be printed on a range of devices of different resolutions. From 1984 to 1987, the use of PostScript by printer manufacturers grew to the point that it became the de facto standard.

The articles in this special section examine the history of desktop publishing. This is the second in a series of articles on this topic. The first issue appeared in the Fall of 2018 (Vol. 40, Issue 3). The first series focused on the developments in the 1960s and 1970s for computer-driven printing and for the technologies that led, in the 1980s and 1990s, to the commercial growth of the desktop publishing industry. This second desktop publishing issue continues the story by describing how the technologies developed in the 1970s, both for the printing industry and at Xerox PARC, became the foundation for the growth of a number of desktoppublishing software companies, including Adobe, Aldus, Quark, Frame Technology and Ventura, as well as Apple’s seminal entry in the industry with the Macintosh, LaserWriter, PostScript (from Adobe), and Page Maker (from Aldus).

In May 2017, more than 15 pioneering participants in the creation of the desktop publishing industry met at the Computer History Museum to exchange and record their recollections.

The articles in this special section focus on the emergence and growth of desktop publishing. This is the third special issue that is devoted to the history of desktop publishing. The first issue appeared in the fall of 2018, and was about the developments in the 1960s and 1970s of computer-driven printing and the technologies that led to the commercial growth of the desktop publishing industry. The second issue, in the fall of 2019, continued the story by describing how those technologies, developed in the 1970s particularly at Xerox PARC, became the foundation for the growth of major desktop-publishing software companies, with articles by founders of Adobe, Aldus, Quark, Frame Technology, and Ventura. The prediction that computers would end the era of print publication goes as far back as Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex. The first two Annals special issues on desktop publishing have documented what happened instead, as computing became central to publishing. They were primarily about the technology and the companies that created the digital publishing industry and made it so popular. We continue that documentation in this issue, and also have two articles on the history of font design, which is central to all publishing, both traditional “hot-metal” and digital.