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| Theme - Journalism jargons |
The first version of the software was released in 1987, with periodic upgrades subsequently. It competes with similar software like Adobe InDesign from San Jose, California-based Adobe, and NewsGate from the Aarhus, Denmark-based CCI.
COMPUTER ERA
In the pre-computer era, journalists worked with just pen, paper and typewriter. The page-making was done by phototypesetting operators, it was never the work of journalists.
After computers entered newsrooms, the entire word-processing operation changed. In the newsroom, journalists make the pages with help from the designers. Journalists now need to know about designing and designers need to know about journalism.
PAGE-MAKING
From 1999 to 2009, I worked on Quark Xpress to make pages of the newspaper I worked for. We had an MS-DOS-based platform on which stories were edited, and the edited stories were exported to Quark Xpress on which the pages were made.
More elaborate and complex design elements like charts, graphs, illustrations etc., were done on Adobe InDesign by the designers, which were then imported to the QuarkXpress pages.
DESIGN TEMPLATES
Since we need to make a newspaper page in not more than one hour, and since the shape of news stories are the same (only the content varies), the 'article shapes' are templated and stored in a library. These templates have a number of dummy articles with different shapes and different headline point sizes.
So all that has to be done is to pull out the required article shape from the library and flow in the edited news story on to this article shape. We need to then only tweak the headline and the article to fit the space.
(This post is a part of the "Blogging from A to Z Challenge April 2019".)