Introduction of Desktop Publishing | What is the Meaning of Desktop Publishing Software?

Introduction to Desktop Publishing

Publishing refers to the process of creating and producing publications such as newsletters, magazines, cards, pamphlets, calendars, books, etc that has special text and graphical designs.
There are traditional publishing and electronic publishing. Traditional publishing including drawing and writing manually on wooden or metallic boards or even a clothes. The artwork of publishing will be painted with ink and pressed on papers to produce a printout designs. Now days people are using much electronic publishing whereby the art of publishing are done through use of personal computers (PC) and small printers that are able to print high-quality text and graphics. This is called desktop publishing that means all the publishing processes are done on a desk at home or in the office.

What is Desktop Publishing (DTP)

Therefore Desktop publishing is the process of producing publications by using special desktop publishing software installed on personal computers, the software is able to designing text and graphics layout. This can enable the user to be able to insert, edit, format and printout a quality document

Examples of desktop publishers;

Microsoft Publisher
Adobe PageMaker
Adobe Photoshop
CorelDraw etc.

Is Desktop Publishing Important?

It create documents that look very nice and prettier. That is improving appearance of documents
It is increasing productivity of a company by advertise through flyers created by DTP software
It is important also because it reduced production costs
It enhance creativity with an element of fun and enjoyment
DTP it has ability to produce customized documents

What is the Purpose of having Desktop publishing software

DTP programs is very important and useful since can control a user on the following areas:

(a) Graphic design.
DTP programs can help a user to create and edit very complex text & graphical objects of high quality. For example, the software provides the user with rulers & ruler guides that can be used to place an object in the correct position within the publication.
(b) Page layout design.
A user can be able to design a page with layout by setting pictures and object locations, divide a page into a number of columns or layers.

(c) Printing.
It help a user to produce any publications, they must be printed it means it has ability of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)Therefore, DTP software helps the user to prepare artwork for printing.

Types of Desktop publishing software

There are mainly two (2) types of DTP software as follows:

1). Graphical based DTP.
This are special programs with the great ability of editing and formatting graphic objects like pictures. It have capabilities of handling images such as setting resolution, brightness, contrast, cropping, and filling the images with colour. Examples for this includes Adobe Photoshop, CorelDraw programs etc.

2). Layout based DTP.
This type of DTP programs specifically developed for the purpose of creating and designing different page layout designs basically for text and pictures.
Examples; Adobe PageMaker, Microsoft Publisher programs etc.