desktop publishing (DTP)

Desktop publishing(DTP) is a prepress technique for creating printed matter, books, brochures and catalogs on the desktop. Translated, desktop is the desk; in terms of personal computers, it is the desktop PC or desktop computer.

Desktop publishing includes all the prepress work involved in creating printed materials, right through to film exposure or plate imaging. This includes creating the basic layout, preparing the texts and the typography with its various fonts, font sizes, typesetting, boldness, the bleed-through between the lines and the spacing of the letters, indexing and pagination, as well as the integration of photos, graphics and tables together with the texts in the layout scheme.

DTP systems offer complete software support, they work with their own image capture, create the color separation and color separations according to predefined color models, have tools for typography, image editing and layout creation, and can output files that are used for immediate exposure of the printing plates.