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Show Mixture of old, new sometimes fails the editor's column It is supposed to be a marvelous mixture, this wedding of stone-age typesetting technology and state-of-the-art, leading edge computer wizardry. But as with most marriages, at times the relationship is tenuous at best. For a couple of years now we have been using computers as word processors to drive our typesetting equipment. It's a nice compromise between using modern technology with older equipment. At the heart of the system is a little blue box called, oddly enough, a "black box" by people who enjoy confusing the rest of us. We just call it an interface, since that sounds fancy without any of us- really knowing what it means. It's blue metal and about the size of a shoe box. It sits on top of our typesetter and changes the computer com-puter message, coded with appropriate symbols to tell the typesetter what to do, into the instructions that make the type in our newspaper look neat - all justified and everything. That way, the words are only typed once, by the person who writes the story. Before, the person would write the story on a typewriter, and then a typesetter would type the story again on the typesetting equipment. classified program and heats the cocoa. For most of those years, the system has run smoothly, too smoothly, so smoothly that we were very comfortable with the system. And anytime you get comfortable with anything that relies on silicon chips to get a job done, you are asking for trouble. Actually, typesetting, along with everything else, has come a long way since Johan Gutenberg invented moveable type. And we are still miles ahead of the hot metal days just by having a photo-typesetter. photo-typesetter. But computers are doing the same thing to publishing as they are to most everything else - altering the way we work almost daily. With laser printers, digital type, what-you-see-is-what-you-get video terminals and all those other fancy innovations, the business of newspapering is changing daily. The problem with every one of those changes is they make you more reliant on technology - and the technology isn't foolproof. Just look at last week's thunderstorm. thun-derstorm. One little flash of lightning, light-ning, the lights flicker in the office, and this marvelous interface is suddenly sud-denly of no more use than the shoebox it resembles. And we're back in the stone-age of phototypesetting again. Like most other people tw advantage of computer ItcM to make a buck, the company built the interface no longer ft We did, fortuitously, trick A former employee of the cwnpu who thinks that if he mum! exact incantation while hoMJ interface over a pot of be1 blood, he may be able to a work apin. . We're not holding our bn In the meantime, the m still comes out, thanks to i degree to another Interface up to an even older typesetter- which runs at about the svV as the old hot metal types-and types-and to a larger degree W Karen, our typesetter j 1 now has to do double duty this all work. . J And every time thectajlij' and the lightning starts down, we turn off aU the po wait for the storm to pass, w power glitch, and we could w, other interface. . j Then we'd be back to wn , stories out by hand. ( And believe me, my could not stand that kind l0After all, that's why invented moveable type place. By MARC HADDOCK You can see the potential for saving time if you eliminate one of those typings. The interface has allowed us to push back our deadlines because things could be done faster, and we've tried to accommodate people who just didn't get a wedding to us on time. We've even gone to typesetting the classified ads through the interface, with a new program that counts the words in the ad, mails the bills and creates the text to generate the |
