With ever-elusive spring just around the corner, seniors are struggling to meet thesis deadlines, taking over personal computer facilities and spending nights and weekends printing and re-printing page after page of thesis drafts on laser printers.

And these days, there are more than just plain texts. Authors change text fonts almost as often as they add new chapters, and some include more well-produced graphs or scanned photographs than bibliographical entries. Thesis-writing is no longer a purely intellectual activity; aesthetics are just as important as scholarship, at least for those who make every effort to dress up their work.

The industrious seniors are not alone. Increasingly, students produce everything they write on a word-processing program and print it up on a laser printer. Term papers, homework, resumes, posters: these are just a few of the wide range of applications of desktop publishing, or DTP, currently a multi-million dollar business.

While computer-aided publishing has been around since the days when mini-computers were king, DTP refers specifically to document layouts done on personal computers. As these desktop personal systems become more powerful, increasingly sophisticated layout requirements can be met in less time and with lower cost.

The term DTP was coined by Paul Brainerd, president and founder of the Aldus Corporation, maker of Aldus PageMaker, the first commercially successful DTP software package.

Originally introduced in 1985 for the Apple Mackintosh computer, Aldus, based in Seattle, Wash., shipped a DOS version a year later and has relased versions for other computer systems. It became successful for several reasons.

First, the program took advantage of Adobe Systems' PostScript, developed to facilitate professional typography on the Mackintosh. PostScript allows programmers to describe to great detail how type-face should look when displayed on the screen and printer.

Second, PageMaker was very user-friendly. Developed under Apple's own guidelines, it was designed to make desktop layouts accessible for everyone, in terms of both cost and ease of use.

PageMaker not only gave the world DTP, but did for the Macintosh what Lotus 1-2-3 had done for the original IBM PC two years earlier: helping to establish the Macintosh as DTP's leading platform.

In fact, the technology has become so popular that most publishing service bureaus use commercial DTP packages to do page layouts and teypesetting. Powerful, professional-caliber programs like QuarkXPress from Quark, Inc., have also made inroads with many nationally renowned publishers: Publications from the New York Times to Rollings STone and The CRimson use DTP for all or parts of their production needs.

The idea of DTP is simple enough: The user does page layouts and previews the final output on the computer screen. The output itself is produced on either a personal laser printer or, in the case of serious publication work, an imagesetter capable of up to 7,200 dots per inch-more than five million dots per square inch.

Because what the user works with is an on-screen image during the layout process, changes can be made as often as the user wants, limited only by the user's imagination. Editing can also be done directly on the page, and such layout chores as alignment and fitting can be automated. The newest versions of DTP programs have extensive color-handling capabilities, making color publishing affordabloe for many.

While the first DTP programs, produced during the early eighties, were actually written for PCs built around the Intel 8086 microprocessor and running the MS-DOS operating system, this platform has lagged behind the Macintosh. Most DTP users have preferred the Macintosh's strong support for DTP and the related area of computer graphics.

But the trend appears to be changing. Microsoft Windows 3.0, released in June 1990, brought to the DOS world the kind of graphical capabilities long associated with Macintosh. Popular Macintosh DTP packages such as PageMaker, QuarkXPress and FrameMaker have all been ported to the Windows environment. A quick browse of Wordsworth in Harvard Square reveals that of the dozen or so books on QuarkXPress, all but two are on the newly-released version of Windows.

Because vendors do their best to make Macintosh and Windows versions of their software identical in both function and look, choosing a platform is no longer as easy a decision as it used to be.

The Macintosh remains the dominant force in the professional DTP world. But as PCs outnumber Macintoshes overall, and setting up a DTP environment on the PC costs considerably less, PCS are becoming increasingly attractive for anyone wanting to start their own publishing efforts.

Haibin Jiu '94, associate photography chair of The crimson, is former president of the Harvard Computer Society. HIs column appears on the Science & Health page on alternating Thursdays.