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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

With Quark successfully refocused both on high-end print and its customers' needs, there's even a chance that future releases will again pull ahead of InDesign. After all, Quark has now realised that its survival depends entirely on providing the most productive professional DTP application, while Adobe has other battles to fight to absorb its recently acquired web-based Macromedia applications while parrying imminent Expression and XPS-based attacks from Microsoft. For the moment, the DTP crown rests with InDesign, which is perhaps fitting considering the roles Adobe and Aldus played in the birth of DTP, but I can't help but feel there are more twists and turns ahead.