Bitstream Inc.

Digital asset management, an enabling technology, is pushing today's commercial printers into the role of tomorrow's information managers. Digital asset management. Unarguably, when these three words are strung together, whether on a trade show floor or at a business luncheon, commercial printers take notice. Grover Daniels II, president of Boston-based Daniels Printing, has a theory on this phenomenon. "The printer is the conduit for the delivery of content, whether the delivery vehicle is print or digital in nature," he professes. Daniels, a fourth-generation commercial printer, prefers to describe his family business as a full-service information provider that will comprise three interrelated business units: commercial

Catalog printers, pay close attention: XML—an enhancement of HTML or a redefined, simplified version of SGML, depending on how you view it—is one document manipulation language you need to know, and know well. XML will be your friend. Why? Extensible Markup Language (XML) allows users to define their own structure and tags, completely tailored to a particular document. XML is considered a subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)—the 20-year-old, far too complex, yet far too vital to lose an ounce of respect for—document language. HTML is an application of SGML. For commercial printers, notably high-end catalog printers that repurpose wares onto glitzy

One of the fun things that columnists get to do is write their predictions for the new year. I've never done it before because I think it's generally a fool's game. As the playwright Eugene Ionesco wrote, "You can only predict things after they've happened." Still, predicting is fun. If you let me make it more of a trends analysis than a hard-and-fast statement of something that will happen in 1998, I'm willing to join the prediction party. Let's look at the major new media issues that will be transformed during 1998: Internet/WebIt was big in 1996 and 1997, and there's absolutely no reason for the

Whether the issue is tracking the status of 4,000 color images for a massive catalog or managing a vault of more than 100,000 images, text and fonts for a sophisticated prepress operation, the secret to success is securing an ingenious workflow. If one word could describe the prepress fervor of 1997—the motivating factor in the development of sophisticated software tools for expediting everything from imposition to job ticketing—that word would be workflow. Workflow, workflow, workflow—that was the single most effective, overused and yet understated buzz- word for 1997. Large commercial printers were implementing extensive technological investments to enhance prepress to postpress workflow, midsize commercial