How Did Desktop Publishing Get Started?
Desktop publishing was the innovation of Paul Brainerd, an executive in a publishing company. He saw that computers were becoming widely used, and that there was potential for a new type of software that would combine text and graphics together on a page— layout software. With a team of specialists, he created PageMaker, the first desktop publishing application. PageMaker used a system known as WYSIWYG (pronounced “wizzy-wig”), which is an acronym that means “What You See Is What You Get.” What you see on the monitor screen is the same as what you see on the printed page. Desktop publishing would not be possible without this ability to see and edit text and graphics together on a page. What Is Desktop Publishing? The basic definition for desktop publishing, or DTP, is the use of a computer to combine text and graphics together on a page. Today’s powerful computers and software make it fairly easy to combine text and graphics together on a page. These skills alone, however, are not enou
