A Newsletter Read Worldwide by Graphic Arts Professionals
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It’s different, and we try to keep it interesting.
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Please, please tell us this recent LinkedIn post* is not indicative of the future of online publishing, digital publishing, or (indeed) publishing in general. If it is, it is not just the “guy down the street” who is going to suffer. If it is, we are all going to be buried under a mass of auto-generated vapid content, at best, and more likely, an avalanche of useless, error-ridden poppycock.
*We erased the LinkedIn’s user’s profile information and also part of the URL that might have indicated something about their identity. We wish to point out a potential problem–not shame any individuals.
October 1-7 is Banned Books Week. A coalition of organizations dedicated to free expression support this important effort to bring attention to attempts to ban books and repress freedom of the press.
The group includes American Booksellers for Free Expression, American Library Association, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Amnesty International USA, Association of University Presses, Authors Guild, Banned Books Week Sweden, Children’s Book Council, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Freedom to Read Foundation, GLAAD, Index on Censorship, Little Free Library, National Book Foundation, National Coalition Against Censorship, National Council of Teachers of English, PEN America, People For the American Way Foundation, PFLAG, and Project Censored. It is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. Banned Books Week also receives generous support from HarperCollins Publishers and Penguin Random House.
This year LeVar Burton is the honorary chair. Burton has a long track record of advocating for books, publishing, and reading. In his statement for this year’s event he says, “Books bring us together. They teach us about the world and each other. The ability to read and access books is a fundamental right and a necessity for life-long success.”
He adds, “But books are under attack. They’re being removed from libraries and schools. Shelves have been emptied because of a small number of people and their misguided efforts toward censorship. Public advocacy campaigns like Banned Books Week are essential to helping people understand the scope of book censorship and what they can do to fight it. I’m honored to lead Banned Books Week 2023.”
Saturday, October 7, is Let Freedom Read Day, a day of action against censorship. You can take part: do at least one thing this week to defend the right to read and to speak on behalf of those who ensure access to information. And, of course, you could always buy and read or check-out and read (you have a library card, right?) one of the books the ALA reports people are challenging (asking them to remove); have a chat with a librarian or bookseller for recommendations. For information about ways to participate and resources, visit bannedbooksweek.org/let-freedom-read-day/. And, here’s more inspiration.
Today came the news the state of Massachusetts is getting tough on the use of plastic packaging. The Environment and Energy Leader website’s article says, “Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said this week she will sign an executive order prohibiting state agencies from buying single-use plastic bottles. Massachusetts is expected to be the first state in the country to achieve a law-enforced ban on purchasing plastic bottles. In recent years, legislators have attempted to make similar bans without success. Healey made the announcement on Sept. 18, 2023, at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City before a panel on ocean conservation practices.”
The article and the news reminded me of an August 2023 article from Duomedia blog entitled Why Paper is Sending Plastic Packing. This article talks about how some major food and beverage manufacturers have decided the world is a better place with less plastic floating around.
Unilever’s pledge to become the first major consumer goods company to commit to reducing plastic across its portfolio has led to numerous developments including recyclable paper based ice cream tubs and Pot Noodle containers.
Heineken UK created Green Grip, a plastic free and recyclable cardboard topper for multipacks aimed at eliminating all consumer facing secondary plastic from packaged beers and ciders.
Nestle switched all the packaging globally for its Smarties range to recyclable paper as part of its commitment to making 100% of its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025. KitKat is now trialing the approach.
Why paper is sending plastic packing
Thanks to Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash for making it possible to use a photograph in this post.
On August 19, 2023 John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe died at age 82 of pancreatic cancer. Sadly and somewhat ironically, this is the same kind of cancer that robbed the world of Steve Jobs, Warnock’s fellow technology visionary, at the age of 56 in 2011.
The careers and accomplishments of these two men wove themselves in and out for decades from the early 1980s until Jobs’ death. The story of Jobs and Apple is legendary. The story of Warnock (and company co-founder Chuck Geschke) and Adobe is less known, but arguably much, much more revolutionary.
It was on January 22, 1984, during that year’s Super Bowl, the now-iconic and totally unforgettable Apple Computer advertisement aired. The commercial never showed the computer itself, but ended with this audio: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”
It has long been my opinion the real reason 1984 was not like the book 1984 and one of the foundational reasons the entire world began to change so profoundly that year is because of the software that is PostScript and not hardware that was Macintosh. As a technology researcher, writer, and editor at National Software Testing Laboratories at the time, I watched the history of the software and the hardware unfold in real time, an experience which has never left me.
To be sure, in 1984, the Macintosh was new and exciting. It got a lot of press in the tech world, but also captured the imagination of the world press. Having Jobs, a young, handsome, and charismatic wunderkind, as its pitchman helped.
Postscript, which Warnock and Geschke introduced in the same year, on the other hand, was, to most people, completely unknown. Even in the graphic arts community at the time, its birth was overlooked, and its potential unrecognized.
But, Jobs needed Postscript to fuel a printer to go with the Macintosh: his LaserWriter. Without the LaserWriter and its Postscript-based print controller, the Macintosh could not have survived more than a few years after its birth.
As cute as it was, the Mac was surrounded in the computer marketplace by some tough, older competition. As someone remarked to me at the time, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
The LaserWriter, which premiered in 1985, was a game-changer for Apple and Adobe. For the rest of us, it was a world-changer. For the first time, thanks to the computer language living inside the printer, which some have called a “software printing press,” publishing could be done on the desktop. Ordinary people could plan, design, and print whatever they wanted.
And with that, desktop publishing was born, and it started its own revolution. As John Seybold, one of the founders of the Seybold Report newsletter (which I joined as an editor in 1988 and now own) dubbed it: WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”).
PostScript also made two more things possible that were also needed to make Apple and its Macintosh champions: device independence and digital fonts. Warnock and Geschke found a way to surmount both of these challenges as well.
A simple blog post does not permit further description of these particulars, but perhaps a quotation from John Warnock, part of a 2017 Computer History Museum oral history, will suffice, “We showed those to Jonathan Seybold, and he couldn’t believe his eyes. He said, “Really?” He said, “This—you have solved the problem,” okay, “For laser printers,” and then Seybold added, “This is revolutionary. This is going to change the world.” Jonathan Seybold is one of John Seybold’s children and founder of the now-defunct Seybold Seminars.
In December 2022 the Computer History Museum released a copy of PostScript source code dated late 1984 as part of its Art of Code Series. Warnock was enthusiastic about the release; he believed in innovation, and he knew the value of history.
David C. Brock, director of curatorial affairs at the Computer History Museum, said at the time of the release, “The story of PostScript has many different facets. It is a story about profound changes in human literacy as well as a story of trade secrets within source code. It is a story about the importance of teams, and of geometry. And it is a story of the motivations and educations of engineer-entrepreneurs.”
Desktop publishing lives on today in the form of digital publishing, and Postscript lives on, too. Millions of people around the world use PostScript on a daily basis and do not know it: the ubiquitous Portable Document Format (PDF), which Adobe introduced in 1993, is based on PostScript. The software is also still used in multiple types of imaging devices around the world.
By Molly Joss
September 2023
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