Abstract :
Printing and publishing is a much bigger industry than one might think. Turnover exceeds £1500 million per annum, i.e. something like 10% of all UK manufacturing output, and it involves 400000 people. Although printing has a justifiable reputation for being a conservative trade, this reflects the past rather than the present, for we are now coping with a genuine revolution in printing and publishing technology. Much of this revolution is intimately concerned with automation. In fact it is the impact of the computer on what is after all an information-processing industry that has triggered the excitement about `new technology¿ that one reads about in the papers. Newspapers themselves are in the forefront of these changes since they have an urgent need for greater production efficiency, particularly in the labour-intensive copy-preparation and typesetting areas
