🚀 go-pugleaf

Anyone know what is in this or where it is going?
		-Mark
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MacWeek, 9/25/90 p.1

"Rivals agree on DTP link:
SERIF format to allow exchange across apps, platforms"
by Carolyn Said

San Jose, Calif. -- A broad-based coalition of computer companies next
week will announce a new document interchange standard that allows for
exchange of page-layout files between programs and platforms.

To be announced and demonstrated at the Seybold Computer Publishing
Conference & Exposition here, the standard, called SERIF (Standard
Entity Rendering Interchange Format), defines the exchange of page
geometry within a frame-based architecture.

It will let users create a desktop publishing document in one
application and open and edit it in another. For example, a user could
rough out a document with Aldus PageMaker on the IBM PC and paginate and
polish it in QuarkXPress on the Mac.

"This would mean interoperability across the spectrum," said Craig
Cline, associate editor of Seybold Reports on Desktop Publishing in
Malibu, Calif. "Most people work in mixed environments. There's been a
strong desire among users to exchange geometry between various
pagination packages so they don't have to start from scratch."

Quark Inc. and Atex Publishing Systems plan to "go into the actual nuts
and bolts" of exchange between XPress and Atex documents at the Seybold
show, according to Dave Stern, senior manager of public relations for
Atex. Other companies may show document exchanges as well.

Spearheaded by Quark Inc. of Denver; Atex of Bedford, Mass.; and IBM
Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., a group called the Professional Publishing
Interchange Standards Committee has been meeting since March to define a
common way of exchanging page geometries. Currently composed of 19 key
vendors, the committee will have a booth at Seybold and will solicit
input from users and cooperation from other developers. The consortium
includes Adobe Systems, Digital Equipment Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

The committee hopes to work quickly and to involve as many people as
possible in formulating the standard, according to Tim Gill, Quark
senior vice president.

Once SERIF is usable, individual vendors will need to release add-on
software modules to let their programs take advantage of it, Gill said.
The standard probably will continue to evolve and grow over time, he
said. The committee is targeting the American Newspaper Publishers
Association convention in June 1991 as an initial release date.

The SERIF standard certainly would affect the way users work, analysts said.

"We're talking about allowing users to define their work flow in a way
that's convenient for them, rather than having to torque their work flow
around to meet the limitations of a particular product," Gill said.