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WHITHER THE MAC? | ||
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from November/December 1997
Apple Computer's recent woes have been big news for Macintosh users everywhere. The Mac's market share continues to plummet, and many large corporations have decided to standardize on the Windows platform. One of Apple's most loyal markets continues to be publishing. What is the Mac's future as a platform for designing and producing books and other publications? To find out we talked to some people who are involved in various aspects of book production. Book designer Gary Head does not foresee any change in the Mac's dominant position in page makeup and digital prepress. He has used both Windows and Mac systems in the past, and he says, "By far the Mac is much easier to use. It's going to be a long time before Windows makes any inroads into digital prepress." Also, he notes that Quark-XPress is the defacto standard for book page makeup, and "right now Quark runs much better on the Mac platform than on Windows." However, Gary admits that it's difficult to predict what changes might come; "I thought I would never have anything but a Mac, but my most recent purchase was a Power Computing model, so things change." Kingston Ku is president of Color Tech, a color separator and prepress company in Redwood City. His company has one Windows system to handle any PC-based work that may come in, but Ku says that all of the designers and in-house production people among his clients continue to be loyal to the Mac. "Once you are familiar with the Mac, Windows is nothing," he says; "Windows 95 is like Mac 85." Configuring peripheral devices and managing fonts is still much easier on the Mac than on Windows. "We don't see any migration at all to Windows," Ku says. Gordon Johnson, president of Interactive Composition Corporation, says that the Mac's future in book production looks secure. His company specializes in math and science textbooks. "The bulk of the work we do on the desktop requires Quark plus a number of extensions," he says, but none of these extensions are available for Windows. Often his customers request or even require a certain combination of software for the composition of their books, such as QuarkXPress plus one of the math extensions from companies such as Powerhouse, York, or Blue Sky Research, plus a pagination extension such as Autopage. None of these extensions is available on the Windows platform. Johnson says that he wishes the same software was available for Windows, since he already has a lot of PCs that could be configured to run Quark for Windows; however, the small software companies that create these specialized extensions have no interest in creating Windows versions, since there is little demand among their customers for such a change. According to Johnson, in order for Windows to grab book publishing market share from the Mac, some software company would need to create a Windows page layout application that was so strong that it would go beyond what's available in Quark and its extensions on the Mac. In fact, this new Windows application would have to be a huge leap beyond Quark in order to justify the time and expense of retraining workers and replacing equipment and software. Johnson notes that his company also has a proprietary composition system that runs on Unix on PCs, but there is a strong trend among his customers away from proprietary systems; many or most customers insist on using commonly-available desktop software, and most customers insist on using Quark. "Quark has become the desktop software of choice," he acknowledges, with Framemaker being a distant second for book production. A more pessimistic view of the Mac's future comes from the owner of a book production firm, who asked not to be quoted by name because of client sensitivities. He believes that too many production people become locked into viewing the Mac and QuarkXPress as the sole option for platform and page layout application, despite the recent shortcomings of both. He has been disappointed in the lack of reliability on the Mac platform ever since the "good old days" of System 6 and states that too much time now is devoted to troubleshooting technical problems with equipment and software. He thinks the new version of Quark is a huge disappointment for book production because it fails to offer any important new features that address unique book production needs. Book people need features such as automatic running heads based on specified subhead levels within running text, or easy-to-format tables. Instead, Quark's new features are imitating Adobe Illustrator abilities - such as Bézier curves - which are of little use for book production. He sees more hope in Adobe Framemaker as an option for intensive book production. Framemaker, a broadly cross-platform application, is available in versions for Windows, Mac, and Unix. Further, Adobe seems committed to advancing Framemaker's capabilities in ways that are useful for high-volume production. This production firm owner comments that too many people are focused on the operating system they are currently using. The more important question is the page layout application and its functionality. "I can learn any platform in a couple of weeks," he says. In the past his firm has created thousands of pages on Windows 3.x using Ventura Publisher before that program fell out of favor, and he never had problems outputting film from Ventura with various book printers. One area where Windows has already gained ground is the editorial side of production. Karen Judd, who oversees editorial production at McGraw-Hill in San Francisco, says their whole office uses Windows except for the designers. In fact, this is true of all 1200 people in the McGraw-Hill higher education division. She says this arrangement is working well, aside from some occasional problems with the file server that shares files between the Windows-based editorial side and the Mac-based designers. Judd does not foresee that design and page layout will migrate to Windows - the designers are far too entrenched on the Mac to switch platforms. One exception is the Osborne-McGraw-Hill imprint, which uses Corel's Ventura Publisher on Windows for all page layout. According to Stephen Thomas at Ann Arbor-based book printer Edwards Brothers, the prepress department has not experienced any change in the proportion of Macintosh files received from customers. About 80 to 85% of all files received continue to be Macintosh, reports Janet Treer, manager of prepress for Edwards Brothers. There has been a decrease in files from programs such as Ventura, WordPerfect, and Microsoft Word as customers have become more sophisticated about page makeup software. Edwards Brothers' experience is that both the Mac and Windows platforms are very comparable now in terms of ease of Postscript output and imposition, as long as the publisher or compositor is knowledgeable about font handling and setting up files for film output. Overall, the Mac seems to be holding its ground as the dominant book production platform. However, predicting what could happen a year or two from now is difficult. Will Apple Computer regain its footing in the market, or will it continue to slide? Will Windows become a more realistic option for Mac partisans? Note that at the fall Seybold show in San Francisco Microsoft promised that next year's Windows NT 5.0 and Windows 98 will have enhanced font handling, more sophisticated color management, and simpler configurations for peripheral devices - all designed to enhance the Windows platform as a serious option for publishing professionals. Time will tell . . . .
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