*** From the Archives ***

This article is from January 28, 2000, and is no longer current.

Publishing Expands in a Shrinking World

I admit it: I’m an American. And part of being an American seems to be a general sense that we’re the center of the universe. So it was with some shock that I recently arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, and found that the questions in my QuarkXPress and Adobe Photoshop seminars there were the same as those questions I receive during courses I give in the States.
In fact, almost everything about the publishing industry was the same. Sure, they spell the word “colour” wrong, but other than that, I could easily have been presenting my classes in San Francisco or Chicago. And that got me thinking: What if Disney was right and it is a small world, after all?
The past five years has offered an astonishing array of technologies that make long distances seem piddly: The Web, widespread use of e-mail, reasonably-high-bandwidth, search engines, Webcams, online-forms processing… We have been assembling an arsenal of tools that place us at the cusp of a global shift in publishing which, in the next five years, will make contintental separation almost entirely immaterial.
Where’s That Picture?
I’m becoming increasingly annoyed by having to worry where my content is. Maybe it’s just another sign of arrogance, but why should I care if a picture I’m using is on my hard drive, or my server, or at PhotoDisc or on a computer in New Dehli? Asset management is not new, but very large scale management such as Quark DMS will soon help large companies (and perhaps the rest of us) manage content–in whatever form it takes, and wherever on the planet it happens to reside.
(One of the most impressive pieces of Quark DMS is the inclusion of the Image Pump technology, allowing dynamic previews of very large images at a reasonable speed over the Internet. If I like a 30-MB picture on a server in Sri Lanka, but I only need a piece in the upper-left corner… no problem: Image Pump handles the data manipulation seamlessly.)
Of greater important might be the eventual incorporation of OPI (or OPI-like) protocols directly into our operating systems, allowing us to select Print without giving a second thought to asset collection. The operating system needs to understand that my images are scattered hither and yon, and be able to intelligently gather them (preferably at the proper resolution and with the appropriate color profile for whatever output device I’m using). When the OS starts to think globally, we’ll be able to work globally.
Even better, for very-widely used assets, systems such as Akamai can transparently distribute the proper data to the right place at the right time. I love these types of systems because they make invisible all the intense work that I hate to even think about.
Global Automation
Technologies that enable people to distribute computing power and assets over a wide geographic area remind me of Mark Weiser’s concept of ubiquitous computing and a world where we’re more concerned with the overall tasks we’re trying to accomplish than we are with which computer is doing what.
Fortunately, two recent advances will help the global transition. First, PostScript 3 lets you assign an IP address to a particular output device. That means if I’m on a high-speed network, it hardly matters anymore whether I’m printing to the laser printer down the hall or to one in a Paris office building… or even to a platesetter in Yokohama. (Granted, the platesetter requires more preparation, but you get the idea.)
Second, Apple’s OS9 lets you run an AppleScript on any Macintosh connected to the Internet by specifying its IP address. Let’s say my pictures are on a server in London, Photoshop is running on a server in Madrid, and the page production department uses QuarkXPress in Paris. I can press a button in Los Angeles that will scale, crop, sharpen, save, import, format, caption, and lay out a page across the ocean before Jean-Pierre even gets his morning café. Suddenly, the whole of the Internet is my Local Area Network.
Portable Documents
Perhaps the most obvious piece in the global puzzle is Adobe Acrobat’s PDF format. Like most of these technologies, PDF isn’t perfect yet, but the recently added ability to include “double-byte” Chinese, Korean, and Japanese fonts in the same files as regular “single-byte” fonts is a great step toward internationalization. The PDF format is important because it offers the ability to move a document from one corner of the Earth to another (not to mention one platform to another), and still have it viewable, printable, and even somewhat editable… This is powerful stuff.
Where Are You?
As much as I like supporting businesses in my own geographic area, I know that the world is becoming more tightly connected, and I believe that businesses–and perhaps especially publishing businesses–will either evolve to reflect this fact or perish. Thomas Friedman, New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist writes in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, “Globalization is not a phenomenon. It is not just some passing trend. Today it is the overarching international system shaping the domestic politics and foreign relations of virtually every country, and we need to understand it as such…. If the defining perspective of the Cold War was ‘division,’ the defining perspective of globalization is ‘integration.'”
As an American, I’m tempted to believe that “globalization” and “integration” mean that the rest of the world will get even closer to me. One of our biggest struggles continues to be overcoming our own arrogance by taking steps toward understanding the cultural norms, language, and practices of the countries in which we’re doing business. Afterall, before you select Print, you’d better grasp the differences among Letter-size, A4, and B4 papers.
No amount of technology is a substitute for truly being somewhere–I’d much rather be processing images near the Thames or laying out those pages on the Left Bank –but as we move toward a more global economy and international market, we will truly be giving a new meaning to the phrase “Think globally, act locally.”
David Blatner is the author of The QuarkXPress 4 Book, Real World Photoshop 5, and others. He can be reached at [email protected]

David Blatner is the co-founder of the Creative Publishing Network, InDesign Magazine, CreativePro Magazine, and the author or co-author of 15 books, including Real World InDesign. His InDesign videos at LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com) are among the most watched InDesign training in the world.
You can find more about David at 63p.com

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