desktop publishing, system for producing printed materials that consists of a personal computer personal computer (PC), small but powerful computer primarily used in an office or home without the need to be connected to a larger computer. PCs evolved after the development of the microprocessor made possible the hobby-computer movement of the late 1970s, when
..... Click the link for more information. or computer workstation, a high-resolution printer printer, computer output device that reproduces data on paper or another medium. Impact printers use a mechanical hammering device to produce each character.
..... Click the link for more information. (usually a laser printer), and a computer program computer program, a series of instructions that a computer can interpret and execute; programs are also called software to distinguish them from hardware, the physical equipment used in data processing .
..... Click the link for more information. that allows the user to select from a variety of type fonts and sizes, column justifications, page layouts, and graphics libraries and often includes support for document creation and editing. Desktop publishing enables a small business or an individual to produce professional-quality materials on the premises inexpensively and quickly without the need for outside typesetting or printing facilities.

desktop publishing (DTP)

Use of a personal computer to perform publishing tasks. DTP allows an individual to combine text, numerical data, and graphic elements in a document that can be output on a printer or a phototypesetter. A typical DTP system includes a personal computer, a high-resolution printer, and input devices such as an optical scanner. Text and graphic elements are commonly created or manipulated with several separate software programs and then combined with a page-makeup program. Powerful DTP programs offer full-featured graphics capabilities.

Using a desktop computer to produce high-quality printed output or camera-ready output for commercial printing. It requires a desktop publishing program, such as PageMaker or QuarkXPress, a large monitor and laser printer. The term "desktop publishing" was very popular when personal computers began to proliferate in the 1980s. Today, almost everything is created on a desktop or laptop computer for publication, whether for print, CD-ROM or online. Therefore, the term has lost much of its significance and is not as widely used anymore.

Beyond Word Processing
A desktop publishing program (DTP), also called a "page layout program," provides complete page design capabilities, including magazine style columns, rules and borders, page, chapter and caption numbering as well as precise typographic alignment. A key feature is its ability to flow text around graphic objects in a variety of ways. Although many word processing programs offer most of these features, a desktop publishing program provides ultimate flexibility.

The Final Layout
Original text and graphics may be created in a desktop publishing program, but graphics tools especially are often elementary. Typically, text is created in a word processing program, and illustrations are created in a CAD, drawing or paint program. Then, the text and images are imported into the publishing program.

Print or Publish Online
A laser printer may be used for final output, but shaded drawings and photographs print better on commercial high-resolution imagesetters. For transfer to a commercial printer, documents are generally saved in their native page layout format such as PageMaker and QuarkXPress or as PDF files. For publishing on the Web, PDF files have become the de facto standard for documents that are downloaded and read independently of the HTML pages on the site. See PDF.

DTP Was a Revolution
Desktop publishing dramatically brought down the cost of page layout, causing many projects to be taken inhouse. Predefined style sheets for newsletters, brochures and other publishing tasks can help rank novices do respectable jobs. Nevertheless, there is no substitute for a graphics designer who knows which fonts to use and how to lay out the page artistically.

Desktop Publishing this Encyclopedia
Previous versions of this database were desktop published in PageMaker. The faint grid lines are used to align text and illustrations, which cause the elements to "snap to" them when dragged close.

(text, application)

desktop publishing - (DTP) Using computers to lay out text and graphics for printing in magazines, newsletters, brochures, etc. A good DTP system provides precise control over templates, styles, fonts, sizes, colour, paragraph formatting, images and fitting text into irregular shapes.

Example programs include FrameMaker, PageMaker, InDesign and GeoPublish.

http://cs.purdue.edu/homes/gwp/dtp/dtp.html.

Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.text.desktop.