Personal computers are used by many people and organizations to make their work life easy. Personal computers have become one of the closest friends of man in today's world. In office or at home, computers are used for various purposes. One such purpose is desktop publishing. Desktop publishing systems allows you to specify and create different margins, helps to type, create and justify written documents, embed illustrations and so on.

There are many types of desktop publishing systems available for use in the market. The most powerful desktop publishing systems allows a user to create illustrations, while some less powerful publishing systems allows a user to insert illustrations created by other programs. Earlier, many organizations and offices used word processing software and graphical software to arrange their written documents and other graphical designs. As time went by, the demand for a high quality finish pushed such software to be better and stronger. As word processing software got stronger and better, the line separating these software and desktop publishing systems got thinner and thinner. But desktop publishing systems did give the user more control over typographical characteristics and provided a more fully colored output, which made such systems quite famous among their users.

A great feature of such publishing systems is that they allow the user to see exactly the type of output they get before the document is actually printed. The user can view a detailed picture of the output through the display, which allows the user to do any type of modifications required, before the actual print is taken. This not only saves money but also saves time, which is of the utmost value in such an industry.

The hardware cost was one major draw back, which of course made a desktop publishing system an impractical and illogical choice for most users. But since the prices of computers and printers began to fall because of high competition, the option of having a desktop publishing system became possible to many. This made desktop publishers to be very popularly used for producing newsletters, books, brochures and other written documents which needed a typesetter.

Many people use offset printing rather than laser printing to get the required print. This method is expensive than laser printing, but prints a higher quality document. This type of printing is especially used if the print involves colors. If a user wants to get an offset print he/she produces a PostScript file which is then taken to a service bureau. The service bureau has special types of machines which will convert the PostScript file to film, which will then be used to make a plate for the offset print. This is not a mandatory technique, and a user can just get a laser printout which is of pretty good strong quality. A laser print is much less expensive and saves more time than getting an offset print, but if very high quality is required, then offset printing is the way to go. It also helps to bring out the tiny details the user wishes to highlight, which will add up to the overall quality of the work done.

Summery: This article highlights the evolution of computer software in desktop publishing and the many uses of such software, the efficiency they create and the benefits they hold in the printing industry.