There seems to be as many magazines and newsletters offering news and advice on desktop publishing – and more popping up every minute – as there are companies with products in this market at the moment. This was certainly apparent at last week’s 1989 Desktop Publishing Show held at the London Arena complex down in Europe’s biggest construction site – Docklands. Although the floor – as expected – was dominated by the ubiquitous Macintosh, against the background of Apple and Microsoft’s plan to develop clone PostScript technology and the resulting plummet in its share price, Adobe Systems, which was also launching a new product and showing off its software on a spanking new NeXT machine, really hogged the show. The product is the European launch of the Adobe Type Manager, a software utility that enables application programs to display and print text in any point size, from the a range of Adobe outline fonts – without the jagged edges that usually occur as type is blown up in size. Although the Type Manager runs on all the Macs, and under Presentation Manager, it works only with Adobe’s own fonts, 13 of which are currently supported. Adobe Type Manager ships in the US on October 16, in Europe in the first week of November. Available from Appropriate Technology Ltd and Letraset UK, both based in London, the cost is UKP80. An enhanced version – Adobe Type Manager Plus – is already being developed, which will add a further 22 fonts to those already supported. On the wider issue of Apple and Microsoft’s intention to develop clone PostScript technology, Adobe vice-president Clinton Nagy said that although the company had expected the announcement, it does not intend to give away or license its technology for free – what we know it is doing however is publishing the specifications of the Type1 typeface and the previously encrypted ‘hinting’ mechanisms that have prevented such clones appearing until now. Nagy did confirm that there is some deep soul-searching going within the company to find out where its strategy went off the rails precipitating these hostile actions against it. Nagy says Adobe currently has 63 products under development in addition to the 60 that are already in the shops, some addressing new areas of interest such as facsimile, electronic mail and high definition television. Adobe now claims to have 32 OEM contracts under its belt, and an installed device base of 600,000. Adobe’s UK subsidiary in London, SW19, is now up and running. Advent’s publishing system Other interest at the show centered around the launch of Unix and server versions of Advent Desktop Publishing Ltd’s 3B2 publishing system – nothing to do with the AT&T Co computer family of the same name. The enhanced Version II of 3B2 from the Swindon, Wiltshire-based company now runs on Apollo’s 4500, 3500 and 2500 workstations and over a network of Hewlett-Packard Vectra personal computers. Both versions of the software will become available under MS-DOS, and in addition to Unix, a version for OS/2 will be developed. 3B2 Version II costs UKP1,200, Version I is reduced by 30% to UKP700.
