Page 53 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

pages. These hand-held devices evolved from desktop publishing, which was introduced in 1984-85 for the typesetting and page-layout of printed books. It was the key application in bringing the production of books and personal computing together on a large scale. Twenty years earlier the first computer text formatting program, TYPESET and RUNOFF, which was developed in 1964 as a mainframe application, was derived from the com- mands used by typesetters to format documents on specialized typesetting machines. TYPESET and RUNOFF was the forerunner of word process- ing programs, and also the forerunner of the HTML text and image for- matting language used by web browsers to format web pages. Page formats of eBooks are, however, limited by screen sizes of the readers; typefaces and point sizes presumably may be selected by users. If pagination changes with type size and eBook reader format, indexing no longer necessarily correlates to page number, but instead to places within the text. Because the page for- mat is not necessarily static as it would be in a printed edition, rather than attempting to maintain footnotes at the foot of pages or at the back of a book, in a digital edition it may be efficacious to conceal footnotes under the text.
In the fifteenth century printing changed the economic aspects of book production and bookselling, much like electronic books have changed the economic aspects of book production and bookselling today. Apart from the transition from the roll to the codex that took place in Late Antiquity from the second through fifth centuries CE, the economic model of man- uscript book production had changed little since Roman times, except that Romans sometimes used slaves rather than monks to write out texts, or paid scribes and illuminators to produce manuscript books. Both the Ro- man and medieval process usually involved the production of manuscript copies of texts one at a time and to order. It has been suggested that when several copies of an identical text were ordered, groups of Roman scribes, working in the same room, might have copied out multiple copies of the same text from dictation, especially in the ancient world when it is thought that all reading, or nearly all reading, was done aloud. Though production
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