The Cole Digest, April 10, 1996

With most publishing technology, you either get it right away or it takes a long, long time.

"I guarantee you that within the first hour, I knew we had something," said Grady Cooper, the pagination pioneer from the Alameda Newspaper Group, based here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cooper, who masterminded the full-page output of the six titles that are produced here, was talking about the potential for using Adobe Acrobat technology for full-page archiving.

A former newsroom type who is now director of systems management, Cooper built the organization's pagination system out of a front-end system he designed himself, linked to components from Harris Publishing Systems Corp.

The six newspapers that are all paginated in the Herald's second-floor "copy desk" -- the Alameda Times-Star, The Argus of Fremont, the Daily Review of Hayward, the Oakland Tribune, the San Mateo County Times and the Tri-Valley Herald, based here -- now produce in excess of 3000 PostScript-based full-page negatives a week.

As with most of the technical types in the industry, Cooper had heard about Adobe Acrobat when it debuted in 1993, so he knew it was a collection of applications that allow PostScript files to be "distilled" into a document format that can be read on a variety of computer systems, regardless of whether the creating application or its fonts are available.

In fact, Cooper had copies of Acrobat Distiller and Acrobat Exchange on his shelf -- he had attended a conference co-sponsored by Adobe Systems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., where the applications had been distributed.

But Cooper didn't take the applications off the shelf until his publisher got a letter from the Associated Press, regarding the AP's plan to introduce AP AdSEND.

The AP was proposing to use Acrobat as a format in which to deliver digital advertising. Cooper opened his Acrobat package and began experimenting.

Within an hour Cooper knew he had a solution to a nagging problem: How long do you keep an ad available on disk?

Cooper said the display ad sales representatives were "pushing management about getting access to old ads."

The newspaper group had purchased a 2 gigabyte hard drive to hold old ads "to see how long we could keep them," said Cooper.

"If you keep [an ad] for 30 days," said Cooper, the ad sales reps "want 60 days. If you keep it for 60 days, they want 90."

Further, Cooper had been experimenting with keeping the whole page in PostScript format. Though saving pages in binary rather than ASCII had saved some space, the PostScript files were just too big.

"We were constantly looking for smaller" files, said Cooper. "The reality is that storage is a problem, whether it's paper, negative or in the computer."

Next time: How Alameda does it.

Onward.

\dmc

[THE COLE DIGEST is written by consultant David M. Cole, editor and publisher of the industry newsletter THE COLE PAPERS. The DIGEST is made available to PressLink subscribers every Wednesday at no extra charge. Send comments by e-mail to cole@plink.geis.com. The COLE DIGEST is the property of The Cole Group, a California sole proprietorship. Reproduction in whole or in part without the written permission of The Cole Group is prohibited. Copyright (C) 1996, The Cole Group. Opinions expressed are those of The Cole Group, unless otherwise noted.

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