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PrinterArchive Blog
Stories about printing, documents, publishing, information systems, and the technologies that changed how knowledge moves.
Featured story
Digital Publishing
From Printed City Guides to Global City Intelligence: How Urban Information Became Structured, Searchable and Comparable
A city directory and a city ranking answer the same underlying question — what is it like here? — but they are built on entirely different machinery. This is the story of what changed between them: how urban information stopped being a printed object you consulted and became a structured record you can query, compare and recombine.
- Information Systems
- Publishing History
- Structured Data
What the journal covers
Four editorial territories
Each one already has an encyclopedia section behind it. Stories are added as the research warrants, not to fill a grid.
- Printing & publishingHow pages get made, and what each production model displaced.
- Document systemsCapture, indexing, retrieval and retention as designed processes.
- Historical transitionsThe moments a technology stopped being infrastructure.
- Modern workflowsFormats, protocols and standards documents actually travel on.
From the archive
Reference reading behind the stories
- historyThe History of Desktop PublishingHow the production of a finished page collapsed from a multi-trade workflow into a single desk — and what that displaced.
- historyEnterprise Document ManagementHow organisations moved from filing cabinets to managing documents as governed records: captured, indexed, retrieved, retained, and disposed of by rule.
- guidesOptical character recognition (OCR)Editorial reference on OCR: its history, recognition pipeline, techniques, accuracy factors, and role in scanning and document workflows.
- toolsWhat Is a PDF?An explanation of the PDF format and why it is central to printing and document workflows.
- historyThe Paperless Office That Wasn't: A 1975 Forecast and What Happened InsteadThe 1975 Business Week forecast everyone cites and nobody has read: what it really was, why the retellings sanded it down, and why it is now half-right.
- guidesDigital PreservationDigital preservation: OAIS (ISO 14721), fixity, preservation formats like PDF/A, and active format management that keep digital records usable long-term.