Show Goes On

For a show that many speculated would be cancelled in the wake of the September 11 tragedies, Seybold San Francisco 2001, held September 22-26 at Moscone Center, accomplished much. Not only did respectable attendance levels—an estimated 21,300 for the four-day exhibit—make remaining vendors (202 out of 234 scheduled exhibit participants) pleasantly surprised, but key technology announcements and product introductions confirmed that the age of media-independent publishing is here.

"Whereas the 'digital revolution' that everyone talked about at Print 01 was a revolution in printing, this show certifies that the digital revolution is here in publishing," says Rochester (N.Y.) Institute of Technology professor Frank Romano, who led an all-day presentation at the show focusing on equipment and technology changes within the print-on-demand market space.

"The key words heard over and over were 'cross-media publishing,' 'network publishing,' and 'media-independent publishing,' all of which deal with the same thing: how information gets captured, edited, formatted, and disseminated in all different ways," Romano continues.

He says, "The issue is how you take that information and put in a PDA, an e-book, on the Web and—oh, by the way—put it on paper. This is the printing company's opportunity to find new ways to take the content their customers give them and release it not only on paper, but get involved in the digital revolution."

Especially given the downturn in the economy and the need for companies to streamline their marketing efforts, the clear message at Seybold San Francisco was that content must be created once and stored economically in a digital format for distribution through a variety of channels.

With regard to the tools content creators use, clearly the trend is toward making them easier to use, with the realization that these creators don't have the time, resources, or inclination to gain highly technical knowledge.

"Who wants to learn HTML? You'd rather just drag and drop," states Quark, Inc. senior product manager Brett Mueller, who outlined in a keynote address the newly introduced QuarkXPress 5.0 page layout application's incorporation of XML to allow a designer to create a print page and, with virtually one click, convert it into an equivalent HTML page for electronic publication.

Mueller says that with QuarkXPress 5.0, his company offers a single application that publishers can use to create content for print, Web, e-books, and other media.

Quark competitor Adobe Systems, Inc. announced at the show the arrival of InDesign 2.0, which affords designers the ability to, among other things, hang punctuation and finely control tracking, kerning, and hyphenation with minimal manual corrections.

Company officials say that the new version can be easily integrated with Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat, Adobe's other design-oriented programs.

Among a bevy of product introductions, Adobe won a Seybold editors' "Hot Picks" designation for its eXtensible Metadata Platform (XMP), a new framework for attaching metadata to files created by InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, and eventually all Adobe applications, thus enabling content to be easily applied between print, the Web, e-books, and other media.

In coordination with standards set by the International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress (CIP4), Adobe also introduced its Software Developer Kit to standardize and simplify JDF implementation for developers and OEMs, thereby allowing end users to better collaborate and specify print jobs within the context of the job itself.

"All of our jobs in the graphic arts industry are to make content more valuable; if it were invaluable, we wouldn't be figuring out how to repurpose it for other media," reasons Adobe's Bob Schaffel, who defines this new realm of business as network publishing.

He continues, "JDF allows you to figure out what to print. You can define the intent early and then bind in the late-stage process more effectively. Printers need to think about content being delivered even on devices like cell phones and Palm Pilots. From our perspective, when you begin the job ticket much earlier, it becomes much more robust."

While the Seybold show was heavily devoted to digital asset management, e-books, and related enabling technologies, print remained a major presence with a variety of displayed solutions aimed at on-demand and wide-format printing, as well as color management and proofing.

For example, Encad unveiled its NovaJet 880, a hybrid eight-color wide-format printer that allows printing on flexible and rigid media up to 1/2" thick.

Kodak Professional, which decided against exhibiting at the show following September 11, had been given a "Hot Picks" designation for its new Model 5260 wide-format ink-jet printer, which permits printing variable-size drops on the fly. The piezoelectric device prints six colors and uses what Kodak is calling Dynamic Contone Printing [see wide-format imaging article on page 32 in this issue].

Océ and Electronics For Imaging (EFI) together introduced two color print servers for the new Océ CPS700 color printer. The Océ 950c and 900c servers incorporate EFI's Fiery color server technology.