DTP: Desk-Top Publishing & Distributed Transaction Processing

Introduction

DTP usually refers to the term Desk-Top Publishing, it means the creation of publishing content or documents using your personal computer or in other words your desktop. There is much software available for creating documents in various formats such as .docx (document made by using MS Word), .pdf (Portable Document Format), .txt (Simple text file), etc. Another full form of DTP is Distributed Transaction Processing, which is a database transaction processing that shares multiple network hosts.

Desktop Publishing - History

The first DTP was developed in 1870 by Xerox PARC, but only started getting into common knowledge by 1978 with the introduction of TeX, and later LaTeX was introduced in 1985. By 1986 DTP was moving into many industries with the development of software such as Amiga, Atari ST, and Timework’s Publisher. In 90’s QuarkXPress, the most popular DTP software of that time was overtaken by Adobe InDesign. Lately, Apple computers have the DTP market in their hold, as the biggest publishing-based OS.

DTP Terminologies

There are different terms to be recognized in DTPs, the first thing we will discuss is the Page type.

There are 2 types of pages in DTP, Digital and Virtual.

• Digital Pages − Digital Pages in a DTP are the pages that have no restrictions on sizes, they change with the change in the size of the display. Web pages like Wikipedia are a good example of DTP on a digital page. The content, when the size of a digital page is changed, rearranges itself in either the size or in the text flow.

• Virtual Pages − Virtual pages in a DTP are the pages that have size restrictions to real-life page sizes since they have to be printed on actual papers such as A4, Letter, or A3, etc. The content in a virtual page DTP always remains the same size with respect to the page size, thus if the page is zoomed in or out the size of the content will also zoom out by the same factor.

Another term in DTP is page layout, the page layout of a DTP can affect the appeal of the content, same is the result in the case of fonts and styles. All these factors affect the appeal of an article to the reader.

Distributed Transaction Processing

Transaction Processing refers to the processing of information divided into indivisible operations called transactions. For example, in online banking, transferring money from one account to another, involves 2 operations the first operation is debiting the money from the first account, and the second is crediting the money to the other account. Distributed Transaction Processing or DTP refers to Transaction processing with multiple host networks.

The Four Criteria for a Transaction Processing - ACID

There are four criteria for DTP, abbreviated as ACID

• Atomicity − The atomicity of a transaction is defined by the success or failure of all the operations in a transaction. This means a transaction is atomic if either all the operations succeed or fail simultaneously.

• Consistency − The consistency of a transaction is defined by the correctness of the changes made by a transaction with regard to the properties and rules of the state (i.e., the object on which transactions are taking place).

• Isolation − Isolation of a transaction means that even when there are multiple transactions taking place simultaneously, they all occur in an order one by one. Thus in a set of transactions, each transaction is isolated.

• Durability − The durability of a transaction means that once a transaction is made successfully its changes to the state are permanent unless a reverse transaction is made, thus the changes by a transaction are impervious to system failure or server crashes.

Conclusion

DTP is an abbreviation majorly used for two things, i.e., Desk-Top Publishing and Distributed Transaction Processing. Both of these have their significance and applications in different industries. Desktop publishing is related to publishing companies, press, and online publishing corporations. Distributed Transaction Processing is mostly related to banking, be it online or offline. We have discussed each in detail in this article.

FAQs

Q1. Name some of the modern-day DTP (Desktop Publishing) Software.

Ans: Adobe InDesign, Adobe Framemaker, Affinity Publisher, Corel Ventura, Microsoft Publisher, PageStream, and QuarkXPress are some of the DTP software available on Windows OS.

For macOS, we have Adobe InDesign, Adobe Pagemaker, Affinity Publisher, CatBase, iStudio Publisher, Pages by Apple inc, and Print Shop as the most popular DTP software.

We can also find some DTP software online such as Canva, Lucidpress, and Piktocharts.

Q2. How does printing work in a DTP(Desktop Publishing)?

Ans: In DTP, the printing is done in the following steps.

• Processing the text using a Word processor

• Images or other illustrations are scanned electronically.

• Both of these are then transferred to a page layout application.

• In the page layout application, the publisher can change and manipulate the look of the content in the printed papers.

• Finally, the prepared content can be printed on electronic printing devices.

Q3. What happens when one of the operations in a transaction fails?

Ans: When one of the operations in a transaction fails, the transaction is no longer Atomic, thus it fails the ACID criteria and the whole transaction is canceled. For example, when you are transferring money using online banking, and after the money is debited from your account but the recipient’s bank servers do not respond, thus resulting in the money not being credited to the receiving account, the transaction fails and the money is returned back into your account.