New World

It's widely accepted that desktop publishing killed the typesetting industry. This is not true. It certainly shrank the industry a great deal. As I recall back in 1984, just before the Apple Macintosh hit the market, roughly 6,000 firms in North America offered typesetting services. In the short-term many of those firms morphed into "PostScript Service Bureaus," offering film output from desktop publishing software. Soon printers began to bring that service in-house, forcing many of the service bureaus out of business. More recently, the near-complete printing industry adoption of computer-to-plate knocked most of the rest of them out of the market. But a core group has