alt Hacker NewsThe reality is DTP outside of pro sectors (i.e. these days InDesign) was rendered worthless by how ubiquitous the tooling was.
In any sector where the barriers to entry are destroyed you either have to go really big or go home.
Replies
askvictor • today at 8:43 PM
No-one will pay for it, but the presence of Publisher, as a tool that people know and use, in the Office Suite, would probably be a substantial feature for many people.
dybber • today at 2:51 PM
And for publisher there probably isn’t the same network effect as for Word/Excel/Powerpoint.
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quietbritishjim • today at 2:55 PM
Sorry but what does this mean? I can't quite parse it. What tooling was ubiquitous?
A lot of this seems to be related to death of the amateur and semi-pro DTP industries:
1. Printers stopped catering to semi-pros and became more binary between "home" and "enterprise" solutions, with very little crossover and with "home" products trying to be as "good enough" dumb as possible (and also in many cases nearly as hostile to semi-pro usage as possible because so many "home" printers became loss leaders for ink cartridge subscriptions).
2. A lot of DTP moved to web publishing. Who needs printed invites when you have "evites"? Who needs printed greeting cards when you have "ecards" and now Facebook walls and group messaging stickers/gifs/memes? Etc.
I have fond memories of the home DTP creative scene in the 1990s. Partly because my mother was deep into it and very creative with it. It is interesting how much has changed between that era (when Publisher was one of several nearly ubiquitous home tools alongside Print Shop) to today (where Print Shop is a dead brand for many years and Publisher has been zombie-like or comatose in the same span, and now scheduled for death).