Let’s there by styles!

To ensure that the layout of publications are consistent, and in the absence of professional typesetters, modern word processing programs support the concept of styles that allows similar paragraphs (titles, text, lists etc.) to have a coordinated design throughout the document. Proper use of templates and styles is essential to achieving pleasing and professional-lolling documents without the intervention of a professional of the printing industry.

Figure 3 shows a natural extension of this model, better suited to the world of interconnected computers. In this case, the final output is not a paper report anymore, but rather an electronic document in a commonly recognized format (Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word, ASCII text, etc.) to be read on the client’s computer. The file is delivered to the client either by e-mail or on a physical support (floppy disk or CD-ROM).

Differences between classical and electronic publishing

Considering the changes previously described, one could think that the main differences are :

• Disappearance of the “middlemen” (publisher, editor, printer)

• Disappearance of the physical medium “paper” to the benefit of electronic files

While these differences are profound and significant, they mostly impact people in the traditional publishing industry. But for the authors and final clients, the main difference resides in the fact that the publishing process, that once used to be linear, has now become iterative. When a manuscript went from the author to the publisher, the author lost most of his control on the document. Except for check of the galley proofs, he could not make any alteration to his work any more. While this may not be a problem for literature, it is not very satisfactory for teachers, engineers, marketing specialists and most other users of printed material, for whom it would often be desirable to modify existing material in accordance to new information, changes in the project or the market conditions, etc. Also, the high cost involved in this multi-step publishing process often hampered the production of intermediate or not fully matured documents. With the advent of text-processing programs, and their widespread adoption for use not only by specialists (word-processing secretaries in the late 70’s and early 80’s) but also by authors, it has become common place for authors to enhance, edit, reshape and completely revise their documents in ways impossible in the time of scissors-and-glue editing. This change was completed with the popularization of cheap laser printers in the 1990’s, allowing authors to quickly prepare final-looking reports.

The main changes for the widespread adoption of computer-based authoring are then:

• Possibility of continuous authoring and editing due to the disappearance of the middlemen; this also lowers the cost of production.

• Possibility of modification of existing documents (iterative instead of linear publishing process).

• Figure 3: Fully electronic publishing process

The change in work process due to the introduction of fully electronic publishing (fig. 3) has had only slight advantages for both authors and clients, namely simplifying the delivery process and reducing the delay between completion of the manuscript and delivery. This gain in time is small, however, compared to the gains previously made when switching from classical to computer-based publishing.

In summary, the most important consequence from the introduction of computers in publishing has been the freedom given to the author to correct, enhance and restructure his document at any time.