Research

These pages give an overview of the history of prepress from 1984 onwards. For a more elaborate list of events, click on one of the years in the lists below. This also allows you to go back to the days when phototypesetting took off and machines from Compugraphic, Berthold or Scangraphic ruled the industry. Enjoy your visit to this virtual prepress museum. Don’t forget to also visit the pages about the history of printing.

Scribus is a desktop publishing (DTP) application, released under the GNU General Public License as free software. It is based on the free Qt toolkit, therefore native versions are available for Linux, Unix-like operating systems, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and OS/2. It is known for its broad set of page layout features, comparable to leading non-free applications such as Adobe PageMaker, PagePlus, QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign.

QuarkXPress ("Quark") is a computer application for creating and editing complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. It runs on Mac OS X and Windows. It was first released by Quark, Inc. in 1987 and is still owned and published by them.

Desktop publishing (also known as DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal computer.

What is desktop publishing and where did it come from? Over twenty five years ago several computing technologies, hardware and software, combined to irreversibly change the design and publishing industry.

The Internet has really evolved over the years. From plain boring HTML pages now we have dynamic beautiful web pages, web apps that allows user to interact on daily basis. One of the important outcome of the Internet has to be CMS ( Content Management System), which allows user produce and manage the content and information of a website. We are going to explain briefly what a CMS is and look into its development over the years.

The CMS Report says more than 200 companies are offering commercial products called Content Management Systems. This does not include most of the 80 no-cost open-source products described on cmsinfo.org. The Google and DMOZ Directories list hundreds more CMS offerings. There are many many thousands of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) who have transformed themselves into ASPs (Application Service Providers) by providing online editing of web site pages - which they often describe as Content Management.

A markup language combines text as well as coded instructions on how to format that text and the term "markup" originates from the traditional practice of 'marking up' the margins of a paper manuscript with printer's instructions. Nowadays, however, if you mention the term 'markup' to any knowledgeable web author, the first thing they are likely to think of is 'HTML'.

A webcam is a video camera that feeds its images in real time to a computer or computer network, often via USB, ethernet, or Wi-Fi.

A LAN messenger is an instant messaging program designed for use within a single local area network (LAN). There are advantages using a LAN messenger over a normal instant messenger. The LAN messenger runs inside a company or private LAN, and so an active Internet connection or a central server is not required (P2P). Only people who are inside the firewall will have access to the system. Communication data does not leave the LAN, and also the system can not be spammed from the outside (Darknet). Many LAN messenger offer basic functionality for sending private messages, file transfer, chatrooms and graphical smileys.