Achieving productivity in Electronic Publishing

This paper addresses the question of achieving productivity in publishing activities using electronic tools. It begins with a brief review of the evolution of electronic publishing, with reflections on parallels in the development of traditional mass printing, and traces more recent work on multimedia and distributed document composition and production. Three questions are addressed in the paper. First, what is the problem we are attempting to address? There is support for a paradigm shift in the field from text processing to document processing with more attention being paid to holistic treatment of documents. Second, is computer technology amenable to document processing? Historically, computers have been designed and geared to the processing of numerical information in structured form. We need to ask how the technology, or at very least our window on it, needs to change to be consonant with the tasks of document processing. Third, is the environment in which this processing takes place appropriate for the technology? More simply put, the office is an environment that does not lend itself easily to the introduction of computing or more broadly to change. Like nay social system, our work environments are subculture that are to some degree self-perpetuating. The concluding segment of the paper addresses steps that may be taken in the workplace to introduce technology in a way that the chances of increasing productivity