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A brief history of DTP

Posted on 25 Sep 2006 at 12:43

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

As Ventura floundered, PageMaker cleaned up the PC market, and as the only cross-platform DTP application its sales boomed from $12 million in Aldus' first year of operation to $100 million by the fifth. However, although PageMaker's interactive, page-based approach was attractively simple and intuitive, it was poorly suited for high-end periodical publishing where efficiency was the overriding goal. It wasn't just the underlying metaphor that was wrong: the code itself proved difficult to update. By 1993, the company was posting quarterly losses; in 1994, Brainerd sold out to Adobe, giving Adobe a foothold in the world of DTP application software and PageMaker a new lease of life. However, the writing was still on the wall and, after an unhappy attempt to graft on frame-based handling, Adobe PageMaker was forced to reposition itself for the occasional office user rather than the professional designer. The last release was 2001's version 7.

Against all the odds, the winner of this first DTP war turned out to be the expensive, Mac-only late arrival QuarkXPress. Oddly enough these apparent drawbacks proved to be its greatest strengths. PostScript was theoretically platform-independent, but sending a PostScript file to an imagesetter was like working half blind - it was much easier and safer to print from the application itself, and all output bureaux ran on Macs. Moreover, for the high-end publishers, Quark's high price was reassuring - they simply didn't want their multimillion-pound businesses running on $99 (or even $495) software. And by entering the market comparatively late, QuarkXPress was in a position to borrow from both Ventura and PageMaker and combine reasonably efficient frame-based layouts with a sufficient level of interactive flexibility - the perfect compromise for publications working to a deadline, like this magazine.

What ultimately led Quark to victory, though, was sheer luck: by the time it finally got round to producing the by-now essential Windows version, 3.1, in 1992, both Ventura and PageMaker had run into the buffers, and QuarkXPress was left as the only serious high-end cross-platform DTP application. It came to dominate its sector in the same way Adobe Photoshop did in photo editing. Success breeds success and Quark skills became a must-have for any aspiring designer, thus cementing Quark's dominance. With no real competition, Quark didn't need to do anything serious to maintain its position - and nothing is pretty much what the company did, milking Quark 3 via minor and expensive point releases for five whole years before 1997's version 4.

By comparison, Adobe was going through a difficult period. The advent of scalable TrueType font handling built into both Mac OS and Windows removed the biggest selling point from PostScript - licensing revenues fell, and Adobe's 1993 attempt to reinvent the technology as PDF (Portable Document Format), a universal exchange format and centerpiece of the paperless office, failed to take off as expected. To continue benefiting from PostScript, the company desperately needed a professional DTP application, but after buying up both PageMaker and the frame-based technical documentation package FrameMaker it found neither a suitable base for further development.

Quark was essentially creaming off all the PostScript-based earnings that rightfully belonged to Adobe, and in 1997 it rubbed salt in the wounds by launching a surprise bid for its rival. Quark presented this move as a way of merging the market-leading DTP application with its natural partners, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat, which certainly made a lot of sense on paper. The big surprise was the anger with which the design community rejected the merger - enough was enough, Quark had exploited its DTP monopoly for too long, and no-one wanted it doing the same across the whole professional designer's toolkit. In any case, it turned out that Quark's bid wasn't quite so public-spirited as it appeared, and that its main rationale was self-interest - Quark wanted to ensure that Adobe divested itself not only of PageMaker but of its secret "K2" project.