Xerox Corp yesterday duly announced its Xenith multi-function print and copy server as the Xerox DocuTech Production Publisher, describing it as the first in a series of electronic document publishing products that will bridge the gap between workstations and business publishing and is looking for it to ignite a revolution as profound as the introduction of the first plain paper copier in 1959. The device produces up to 135 prints a minute and incorporates a scanner that creates 600 dot-per-inch digital masters from hard-copy originals for storage, retrieval manipulation and printing; it has an icon-based user interface, which enables the operator to program job tickets, control and adjust image quality, perform make-ready operations, and manage jobs queued for printing; and a 600 dot-per-inch laser printer with in-line collating, stitching, binding and stacking. One job can be scanned, stored digitally, and programmed while another is printing. The user interface enables the operator to make electronic changes in stored images equivalent to the cut-and-past make-ready process – add or delete blocks of text; move blocks of text, graphics, or photos from one source document, manipulate them, and reinsert them into another document; crop, mask, or rotate images; reduce, enlarge, or stretch images; and remove backgrounds and paste-up lines. Monochrome and colour photos can be screened digitally into halftones in one step and documents with both photos and text can be scanned in one pass. It can print on both sides of up to 11 by 17 paper with a single run through the machine and is operated by touching icons shown on the user interface, an 80 dot-per-inch monochrome 17 CRT display, which also has a four-bit gray scale to show the final printed output. At the New York launch, the company demonstrated the networked version of the DocuTech, the Network Publisher I, which will enable users to publish documents from electronic as well as hard copy sources by adding a network print service to enable it to receive electronic input from the DocuTech Network Server or floppy disk input from the Media Server. On performance, the company reckons the thing can do manuals and such 25% more cheaply than conventional metal plate offset, and in 20% of the time. The DocuTech costs $220,000 for US delivery now; it arrives in Europe next year. Next year, a Remote Interactive Communication capability will be added, the base Production Publisher will be field-upgradable for integration with existing document publishing networks, and a Network Server or Media Server will support publishing documents in Interpress, Hewlett-Packard PCL or PostScript page formats. The network server will run Novell’s NetWare as the network operating system, and will support AppleTalk, TCP/IP and Ethernet.
