Randy H. answered • 06/03/19
35+ Year Vet in Print & Digital Publishing, Certified Adobe Trainer
As someone who's done this for newspaper and magazine publishers since the days before desktop publishing, I'd say that it democratized the industry. Desktop publishing reduced the barriers to creating all kinds of published materials to the point where anyone with basic skills training can produce them.
While the last 30-odd years of desktop publishing is but a fraction of the history of the industry looking back to Gutenberg's first printing presses of the mid-1400s, desktop publishing has revolutionized the industry. It's easy to take this for granted today.
Before desktop publishing, there was a whole industry of specialized prepress operations, using expensive proprietary equipment and staffed by arcane specialists like typesetters, color separators, pasteup artists, film strippers and platemakers. Today all it takes is less than $1,000 invested in a personal computer and software, and easily-trainable skills to meet and exceed the quality that took millions of dollars in equipment and technical staffs with specialized skills to produce in the early 1990s.
In short, before desktop publishing you had to be rich enough to buy ink by the barrel to be a publisher. Today, if we're willing to address this in digital terms, all you need is a personal computer and a registered website. Desktop publishing leveled the playing field and laid the groundwork for the information explosion of today.
