putting it to bed

Back in college, we had a printer put The Lafayette to bed for us, though the paper eventually transitioned to PageMaker after I had left the editorial staff. I'm sure it proved an immense time saver. When I was on staff, the system was to have the printers typeset everything all over again. Tremendously inefficient, and doubtless more expensive too.

The first paper I worked for professionally used a combination of Dewars pagination and paste-up. Dewars was the system we used at Forbes Newspapers in Somerville, N.J. It was a paignation system that didn't involve a mouse at all; commands were done on the keyboard with keystrokes like M (move) LA9 (left of page element A9). We used it in tandem with a version of XyWrite.

t seems a little clunky, but once you got familiar with it, it was easy to build a page rapidly. The only other place I saw it used was at The Princeton Packet, where the classifieds people were using it for their work. I'm told it was a pretty popular system for a while, although a few companies didn't buy it since the same fellow was the programmer and marketing person, suggesting it was a one-man business that would be sold once it reached the appropriate threshold -- which it was.

Since then, it's been all software -- up until now. WCN Newspapers, where I've been for six or seven months, still uses paste-up for everything. It amazes me.