Publishing a Computer Graphics Book With Prototype Desktop Publishing Tools

The first major computer graphics text, Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics,1 was inspired by a course, a research project, and a set of notes, all by Ivan Sutherland. In 1971, William Newman invited me to join forces to supplement his partial book draft with notes I had been writing. The book, which appeared in 1973, was received well, exceeding the sales projections of its publisher, McGraw-Hill. Between 1973 and 1977, William and I were research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) working on tools for an “office of the future,” focusing especially on interactive graphics and raster printing. We realized that raster displays and printers would soon dominate and would require mastering new techniques and adapting old ones. The second edition of our book, a complete rewrite, introduced some of the new technologies. This note is a story of the writing of the two editions of the book and it is also a story about how the editions were published in the era before commercial desktop publishing systems. In both the cases, we exploited and adapted computer tools of the time to do much of the publishing ourselves. For the second edition, we chose to use the illustration and printing tools we had developed at PARC to produce camera-ready copy. Especially significant was the use of the Press file format, an early page description language, to combine onto each page the various separate components prepared by different composition tools.