coderre@DSSDEV.DEC (Plaid poindexter barbats--Zippy) (12/27/85)
Atex (a division of Kodak) is a medium-sized, somewhat matured startup firm that produces big newspaper-oriented composition systems (i.e. the whole shebang down to custom terminals, and not "general-purpose" but dedicated). Once upon a time they hired another company (AKI -- Automix Keyboards Inc) to turn their great big "city newspaper"-style system into a smaller "type shop" system. Now, the Atex system is truly dedicated: they have their own crazy disk controllers to do HNJ (hyphenate-and-justify) really fast. The terminals have lots of special-purpose keys on them, one labelled "HNJ", so on. The Atex systems are also "connectable", so the Boston Glob and USAYesterday use, like, a "mess" of processors all connected together, transparent to the users. Hot stuff. But just for newspaper/type shop kinds of situations. Now, Atex handles almost every kind of typesetter available, usually very well. The marking system is not WYSIWYG, but rather WYSIwhere-the-line-breaks. They have different rendition modes (bright, underline, reverse, blink, combinations) to indicate type styles. All the newswriter has to know is that bright is bold, underline is italic, etc. Of course, the user can easily redefine these modes as he wants or draw them from a "style file." I work at the MIT student newspaper *The Tech*, and we own an 8-terminal AKI setup. It cost a LOT ($50K<x<$100K). We have decided that it was the best (and most expensive) system we could have bought. This several years down the road. Atex systems do almost everything right, and have so few bugs in them that it is appalling. The popular word processor *XyWrite* is of the same inspiration as the Atex systems. Many things work in just the same way. To the question: Atex does support over-the-modem style input, with lots of good tricks to convert input into non-common typesetting marks. You can define your own translations, i.e. "@m" could convert to an em dash, which I'll bet your terminal doesn't have on it (Atex keyboards do). You will have to talk to your system wizards or Atex helper to find out just what stuff you need to do this (a modem port and optional software, probably). After that, you set up the translation tables and modem server (mysteriously called REMOCR, you will want to play with the GOPs, too!), and wait for data to pour in. I myself typeset a medium-sized (30pp/month) newsletter on The Tech's AKI in just that fashion. Send any replies to me directly.......................................bc