The Development, Review and Prospect of Electronic Publishing in China

I. The development of electronic publishing in China In the past 20 years, China's printing and publishing industry has gone from direct lead to the use of laser phototypes, from the aircraft to the newspaper layout paper type directly to the satellite remote transmission layout information directly without the hair stick and output directly. Page color layout has been using Internet technology to achieve a leap-forward development process of newspapers and printing companies, which has made China's prepress technology a top-ranking player in the world. The whole process can be attributed to the following four technological revolutions.

1. The first technological revolution two bid farewell to lead and fire, jumped directly from lead to advanced laser phototypes (1987 ~ 1993)
More than 20 years ago, almost all of China's printing plants used typesetting. After investigating the technical features of the second generation of photoimagesetters and the third generation of cathode ray tube typeetters, the level of Chinese technology and the number of Chinese characters were increased. The characteristics decided to skip the second-generation image-setters that were popular at the time and directly develop the fourth-generation laser photo-enhancement systems that were not available in the world at that time.

As a result, the Chinese printing industry has not experienced the second generation of photo-enhancement imagesetters, and the third-generation cathode-ray tube typeetters have directly jumped from the lead to the most advanced fourth-generation laser phototypesetting.

The problem of large number of Chinese characters and too much storage of font information in the implementation of the laser photocopying scheme forced us to use the outline description of the glyphs earlier than the western counterparts to reduce the amount of information; and because the strokes of the Chinese characters are required to be enlarged or reduced, the horizontal and vertical directions are required. Strokes must be even. It prompted us to use HNT to describe the width of strokes and their heads and tails, etc., to ensure that the strokes when the words are doubled in size are well-proportioned. In addition, we use the full-page output scheme at the beginning regardless of the row of books or Scheduling achieved full page layout and full page output. Therefore, China did not experience the process of exporting tops and artificial stickers and jumped directly to the entire page of the entire page of the screen.

2. The H-Agricultural Revolution: Skipping the use of a newspaper fax machine and using a remote description based on a page description language (starting in early 991)
In the 1980s, Chinese newspapers used airplanes to transport paper-based individual cities to newspapers and fax machines. The printing quality of printed newspapers was degraded due to distortion. We have used the same type of typesetting system for newspapers in our country. From the end of 1990 we have used a unified page description language to transmit newspaper pages. The recipients can interpret the page information without losing their original page layout. Moreover, the amount of information is greatly reduced by about 1/50 of that of the usual facsimile method and the transmission speed is therefore very fast. In 1992, the "People's Daily" used satellites to transmit a layout to 22 cities across the country on average every two minutes. This technology will soon be promoted in the domestic and overseas Chinese newspaper industry. After 1992, most of China's central-level newspapers used this method to remotely transmit newspaper pages to foreign provinces and some city newspapers also greatly expanded circulation in the province.

3. The Third Technological Revolution II Saying Goodbye to the Traditional Electronic Color Separator (Beginning of 1992)
Before 1992. All Chinese color publications use the imported electronic color separation machine to produce a one-page color version of the newspaper. It takes 2-3 hours for the manual coloring of the film to be produced by the color separation machine. In 1987, we proposed the development of an open color photocopying system to replace electric extensions. In January 1992, “Macao Daily” used the domestic color newspaper publishing system to output a color version of the text and color photo table in just over 20 minutes (now shortened to 2 minutes), thereby starting the color publishing technology to bid farewell to the extension. revolution. There are already hundreds of newspapers out of dozens of color newspapers every day. Domestically produced systems account for more than 90% of the color market. In the old 94 years, we also developed a high-end color desktop publishing system that was comparable in quality to an electrical extension and entered the field of art magazines and color magazines.

4. The fourth technological revolution: Farewell to paper and pen. Management of the entire process of news information processing (starting in early 1994)
In January 1994, "Shenzhen Evening News" adopted Fang Zhengxuan's process management system, and edited his own group edition to bid farewell to paper and pen. At present, there are more than 200 such newspapers. In addition to the acquisition and processing flow management system, it also developed an integrated management program that integrates advertising management and production systems, distribution systems, and electronic news reporting systems and integrates closely with the newspaper group publishing system to form newspaper company information. The development of the Internet provides favorable conditions for a highly integrated newspaper company's overall solution. Now layout information is not only used for printing, but also directly exported to Web servers, forming a well-timed electronic newspaper; manuscript data using standard XML language for online measurement Browse. Due to support for Intranet, Internet users can use the Internet for editing and editing processes at any location. The chief editor of Guangzhou Daily was in the United States. Through Inter, et's understanding of the newspaper's workflow has surprised foreign colleagues.

Second, online publishing will become

Electronic publishing mainstream development in China

The concept of Web publishing that appeared a few years ago was composed of two concepts: "Web-based Print Publishing" and "Web-based Publishing." These two concepts have now been unified under the banner of "Web-based cross-media publishing."

1. Cross-media publishing of newspapers and publishers, cross-media publishing newspapers, and publishing houses have started. The Internet spans time and space with the characteristics and advantages of large amounts of information. The greatest impact on the newspaper industry. The advantages of I CP newspapers on the Internet lie in the brand effect, wide information source, and strong editing and editing system. As soon as possible, the existing advantages of the newspapers are reflected in the Internet as the universal desire of the Chinese newspapers.

From the appearance of the first mainland China online newspaper on the October 20, 1995 issue of the China Trade Daily, almost all of China's major newspapers have been published online. The main technical issue posted online is how to solve the differences in the format of printed and published data and online publishing data. This problem has no serious technical obstacles in China. This is mainly due to the technical choices we made when we designed the newspaper system in the newspapers. When the XML standard is still in the drafting stage, we will define the XML as the normalized data standard for the draft manuscript system and the XML data will be implanted into the layout through the soft plug-in of the layout software to realize the interface between XML data and printing. Through the self-developed electronic newspaper system, the XML data is converted into HTML to realize the online publication of news data. At present, there are more than 30 major newspapers in China that have adopted this cross-media press release solution.

China's publishing houses have also begun planning to publish their contents on the Internet in the form of esook over the past two years under the influence of esook technology. The publishing house holds a large number of electronic files stored in software formats such as Founder typesetting software and Microsoft Word software. To achieve the online distribution of these books. Need to solve the data of the Internet browser, copyright protection, publishing server and data format normalization. Now these technical issues have been solved to achieve the simultaneous publication of printed books and eBooks and cross-media publishing in the field of book publishing.

2. Workflow technology will be used in China's printing and publishing industry The use of Chinese printing companies in the digital transformation process, there is a common phenomenon of digital production output and manual folding. This incomplete digitalization has a negative impact on the application of CTP and the significant increase in production efficiency. Workflow technology breaks the current digital and manual coexistence situation in China. Provides technical support.

The promotion of workflow technology in China has its own unique approach. Most enterprises have gradually achieved digitization of digital proofing, PDF output, and DAM management from the point of view of realizing CTP output.

The technology of digitized folding of the farewell Scissors has made many printers cancel the manual publishing of a large proportion of the plate making process regardless of the number of people or the factory area. obstacle.

The popularity of digital proofing has a higher degree of difficulty than a digital one. In addition to the reason for customers' acceptance, the low level of data management in printing companies leads to unstable printability, which is another reason why digital proofing is difficult to promote. At present, printing companies and equipment manufacturers have realized this and started to solve it.

The development of the production process of the printing company also promotes the development of the printing company's management process on the other hand. Among all types of Chinese enterprises, the printing industry is the most popular industry with computers as the production tool. However, the level of information management in this industry has been low. The contrast in production and management information has become a feature of this industry. The internal electronic commerce system represented by the production process management of printing enterprises. The importance of enterprise production has been recognized by more and more companies.

3. Internet-based e-publishing will gain wider development in China In the past, China's printing and publishing industry developed in a technological leapfrogging manner, and will continue to do so in the future. In some areas of China that have not yet seen television, they can use the Internet. Due to the imbalance in economic development, there is still a lot of room for development in China's printing and publishing industry. According to statistics, China's annual per capita print consumption is only around US$10, which is only 20 to 30 times that of developed countries. Under such market conditions, the development trend of co-promotion and co-prosperity between print publishing and online publishing is predictable.

Facing Opportunities and Challenges Brought by the Internet China's publishing and printing industry has shown great enthusiasm Many companies have adjusted their orientation in a timely manner and repositioned in a new environment. Newspaper and book publishing industries choose cross-media publishing as a new direction of development. Design and production companies expand their business to web and cross-media data production. Printing companies expand their business and living space by expanding the variety of print products and service projects. These adjustments have added new concepts and new content to electronic publishing and added new vitality. The development and progress of human social civilization is endless. Printing and publishing, as a product of human civilization, will surely continue to develop together with human civilization.

About the Author

Wuxi, Jiangsu, Han nationality, was born in Shanghai in February 1937. In 1958 graduated from the Department of Mathematical Mechanics, Peking University, majoring in computational mathematics (undergraduate). Now he is the director, professor and doctoral tutor of the Institute of Computer Science, Peking University. He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, an academician of the Third World Academy of Sciences, director of the State Key Laboratory of Letter and Information Processing, and director of the National Engineering Research Center for Electronic Publishing Technology. Chairman of the (Hong Kong) Board of Directors, Vice Chairman of the China Association for Science and Technology, Deputy Chairman of the Jiu San Society, Director of the National People's Congress, and Deputy Director of the NPC Teaching, Scientific, and Health Committee.

Professor Wang Xuan won the gold medal in the 14th Geneva International Invention Exhibition in 1986. In 1987, he won the first prize of National Science and Technology Progress Award and the first Bi Sheng Award. In 1990, he won the Tan Kah Kee Award. In 199, he won the special prize for the development of national major technical equipment. In 1995 won the first prize of national scientific and technological progress, UNESCO Science Award. In 1996, he won the Wang Danping Science Prize. He was awarded the Taiwan Pang Wenyuan Culture and Education Foundation Award in 1997 and the Hong Kong Chiang Kai-shek Achievement Award in 1999. In 1993, 1995, 1999, and 2000, they were also awarded the glorious titles of National Model Workers, National Advanced Workers, Capital Models, and Capital Spiritual Civilization Construction Award.