Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn't Make It (2022)
31 comments
·July 9, 2025taeric
Reminds me of printing cards at home. Reading, I almost skipped over where this referenced Print Shop, as I didn't recognize the name. Their article for that, https://tedium.co/2016/06/02/the-print-shop-banner-decade/, is ridiculously nostalgic. I think I can hear that main banner printing.
com2kid
I grew up during the 90s, which was the height of home made greeting cards. Magazines ran huge spreads comparing different programs for how well they could make banners and cards, how good their clip art collection was, and how easy they were to use.
I remember as a kid that making personalized greeting cards was just what you did. I had a computer, I had a color printer, every holiday was getting a unique card! Family events had giant banners that I spend hours taping together. One year I did a space themed banner (I use a "space image" generation program that did stars and nebulas and such) and then realized my mistake when it took forever to print out 15+ sheets of paper with a solid black background (oops).
Nowadays I don't even own a color printer (black and white laser), and I haven't tried making custom cards in forever.
IMHO it is just one more example of how PCs have become content consumption devices rather than outlets for creation.
rbanffy
I remember Publish It for the Apple //e. It was unbelievably good for a 1 MHz CPU. And the print quality on a dot matrix was also impressively good (even though it didn’t use the maximum possible 244 dpi my printer had)
We have to cut some slack for the titles from platforms that died - it wasn’t completely their fault at least.
taeric
I confess complete bewilderment that Print Shop is still around! It is called out for not being on the main list because it is still selling. Holy crap!
jamesgill
PageMaker was enormously popular in the 80s/90s. It was everywhere. I remember writing two different sets of computer manuals with it.
I also used GeoPublish, because Commodore! It was fantastic on the C64.
adolph
GeoPublish was part of GEOS which is an also-ran OS from early days of graphical computing. I personally used it for home compute as a kid; coming from a Kaypro it was pretty wild.
Former CEO of GeoWorks claims that GEOS faded away "because Microsoft threatened to withdraw supply of MS-DOS to hardware manufacturers who bundled Geoworks with their machines".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)
wduquette
The "Sirius microcomputer" pictured as "The Book Machine" is in fact a Victor 9000, as you can see in the picture. The same unit was branded as "Sirius" in Europe and as "Victor 9000" in the U.S.
I spent quite a lot of time with the Victor 9000 in 1983-1985, as my college bought a bunch of them, and I was the student computer lab guy who supported them. It was a fascinating machine with some really cool specs: built-in 800x600 pixel monochrome graphics, redefinable keyboard and character set layouts, built-in serial and parallel ports, high-density floppy drives, and an 8086 processor. It ran CP/M-86 and MS-DOS. Its closest competitor was the original IBM PC, which at that time had low-density floppies, no graphics, no built-in ports, etc.
The downfall of the Victor 9000 was that it pre-dated the rise of the "PC-clone": third-party PCs that could run exactly the same shrink-wrapped software as the IBM PC did. In the CP/M-80 8-bit world, every manufacturer had its own disk formats, screen sizes, and so on, and you had to buy shrink-wrapped software for your own specific hardware, and the Victor-9000 folks assumed that the 16-bit world would work the same way. As a result, they produced a much better machine than the IBM PC...that wasn't fully compatible.
vidarh
Victor was also co-founded by former MOS Technologies people, including Chuck Peddle, one of the key people behind the 6502 CPU, and Commodore's earliest computers.
leakycap
I rarely see mention of UniQorn, a DTP app based on Apple's short-lived QuickDraw GX graphics engine.
Some portions of UniQorn lived on in Softpress Freeway web design app that was on shelves in boxes in Apple stores for many years.
WillAdams
A few which weren't listed:
- Calamus --- a German tool based on a document model, it was pretty interesting
- Ready-Set-Go --- this was a contender, with a quite vocal fanbase
- Microsoft Publisher --- this was just announced as development ceasing
and the cool British program which did ink mixing and took paper characteristics into account whose name I can't recall.... (and was hoping would be listed)
Kind of silly to list PageMaker, since its successor, K2 became InDesign (which was so promising, Adobe bought Aldus), and Serif Page Plus, since Serif now publishes their Publisher application (fortuitous name choice for them).
speterNJdev
And don't forget Stone Create
WillAdams
If we mentioned Stone Design Create, then we have to add Pages.app by Pages.
jamesbooker83
You mention a British program. I do not know about the specific features you mention, but a British company called Serif used to make very highly-regarded DTP software.
I think they were bought by Corel
Edit: Serif are in the article, sorry
tinier_subsets
> I think they were bought by Corel
Serif (makers of Affinity suite) were bought by Canva last year. So far, they’ve honored their perpetual licenses and still offer them, but it seems like a perilous proposition given Canva’s audience and sales model.
pavel_lishin
Publisher was incredible. I remember using it to make websites - giant imagemaps! - as well as a mock newspaper for our high school that we managed to get in trouble for.
ornel
My father set up a Ventura Publisher-based publishing shop in the 80s and it was great. I got to use a laser printer for the first time, retouch photos with Corel Paint and play around with GEM, which I remember had an extremely smooth mouse pointer. All in glorious high resolution (720x348) gray scale.
cormullion
Interleaf rose and fell spectacularly. Writing the entire user interface code in Common Lisp was an interesting feature.
asplake
Well I learned that FrameMaker still lives! Takes me back to a past life. Who uses it now?
Finnucane
Not me, sadly. I used it a lot back in ye olde dayes, but when Adobe killed the Mac version I had to give it up. I have not forgiven them for this. And now it is subscription only, and separate from CS. I make sad face now.
MarkusWandel
Same here! We used it - on Solaris! - for document preparation at work. I have to admit that preparing and pasting graphics into Word with Visio is better than the FM graphics editor, but OMG, I wish I had that table tool back compared to the abomination in MS Word.
dylan604
> I make sad face now.
If only you had said sad Mac
pstuart
This takes me back. It's missing Quark XPress.
Around that time I was dating a typesetter who did DTP as well, and I got into the game and did gigs using Quark, Ventura Publisher, and Pagemaker. Good times!
Amusingly enough, Word 4.0 on the Mac had enough layout capabilities to do a lot of basic publishing needs.
All these many years later I can ace those online kerning tests....
insane_dreamer
PageMaker was awesome -- and ultimately transformed into InDesign which is excellent.
dylan604
Was it transformed, or replaced by? They were both available for some time
russellbeattie
This missed one of the most badly named applications ever made: "Publish It!" It wasn't bad for an Apple II program, but say the name out loud to see why it's not a surprise that it is lost to history.
I had an Amiga in high school when my neighbor ahem loaned me his PageSetter disks. It was hard to use in places, and it surely crashed a lot, but I got great grades on the homework I created in it, which often looked nicer than what the school newspaper was able to pull off.
DTP probably doesn't seem like that big of a deal to anyone today outside of a publishing house. It was freaking amazing at the time. Me, some dumb kid with an off the shelf computer, could make reasonably professional (if not exactly elegant) documents just like the news and print people? It seemed unthinkable.