What You See Is What You Get

What You See Is What You Get: Desktop publishing and the production revolution at Cambridge University Press 1980-1996




"An engaging and clearly presented account of the revolutionary move to digital printing from the perspective of the publishing industry. O'Reilly's interviews with key figures in these developments offer extraordinary insights into a world now changed beyond recognition."

- Dr Máirín MacCarron, formerly Heritage Project Co-ordinator at the National Print Museum, Dublin.




With the arrival of Postscript page description and raster-image laser printing came a revolutionary change to the methods by which books were produced at Cambridge. This was the time when the tools of content production became fully digitised, the workflows were revolutionised, and when the leaders of the Press sought to innovate in preparation for an uncertain future in academic publishing.




This book reflects on the content-production processes of the academic publishing industry between the years 1980 and 1996, and provides an account of the design, composition and prepress workflows in place at Cambridge before and after the integration of desktop-publishing technologies.




Included are the indexed, verbatim transcripts of interviews with:

the period's Publishing Operations Director; the Production and Design Manager of STM; an Academic Books text designer; the Managing Director of the Technical Applications Group (TAG); a prepress technician; and the first desktop-publishing typesetter to be employed by the Press.




Tom O'Reilly worked in the Academic & Professional Books Production department at Cambridge University Press, 2007-2014.