By Hani Mustafa When it comes to production, a weekly publication is less of a headache than a daily, but it is still not exactly a walk in the park. When I think back to how we used to do things before computers (at first, Apple Macintosh), my mind wanders. Now that we're all using desktop publishing programmes, it is easy to forget how things were 20 years or so ago. In the first two years of Al-Ahram Weekly 's life, the production process required a large team. Samir Sobhi, in charge of the paper's lay-out, officially known as the Art Section, would draw up the pages using a ruler and pencil and then produce a mock-up of the page. Meanwhile, members of the lay-out section would begin to sort out the components of the page, estimating the size of the articles and preparing the photographs and so on. We had to write the exact size of all the photographs on the back for the benefit of the person doing the resizing. The process was complex, but Sobhi was there all the time, making sure that nothing had been left undone. In the first months of the newspaper's life, Sobhi trained an entire team to follow a new style of lay-out, one that he designed specially for the Weekly and that was quite unusual in the Egyptian press. Within a few months, one lay-out artist after another would try his hand on a design of his own and show it to Sobhi to make sure that it fitted in with the rest. Soon, everyone became adept at the new concept. The Weekly brought a new vision to lay-out, one that matched the inspiring editorial vision that was unprecedented at the time. One unit of the design section collected the material, and another specialised in decreasing or increasing the size of the pictures. Another unit wrote headlines and adjusted story sizes to fit the space available. The equipment used was huge. The photographic machine alone took up a full room. Once everyone had done their bit, we all used to go to the montage section of Al-Ahram, the production area situated on the third floor of Al-Ahram 's old building. This building had been inaugurated in 1968, and the new building now housing the Weekly 's offices was a later addition conceived by the newspaper's then chairman and editor-in- chief Ibrahim Nafei. Many publications were produced in Al-Ahram 's montage section, not all of them necessarily the editorial responsibility of Al-Ahram, each at a different time of the week. Our turn was on Tuesday night, right after the newspaper Al-Ahali had been finished. We used to work there until midnight on Wednesday, or perhaps until the early hours of Thursday. The Weekly 's Art Section would supervise the montage process, making sure that the exact design of the page mock-ups was followed, with Weekly designers intervening as needed in the production process. The montage area also used to be a kind of journalistic inner sanctum. Everyone involved in the production process was there: journalists and editors, artists and technicians, all congregated there to make sure that everything was going as it should. The newspaper's founding editor-in-chief, Hosny Guindy, was always the last to leave. A perfectionist to the end, he needed to be there in order to make sure that the final lay-out was just as he wanted it to be. A man whose name was Amm Ibrahim would come around every half hour or so, a tray filled with hot drinks in his hands. He used to sell coffee and tea, as well as a variety of herbal infusions, including cinnamon and aniseed. You had to order your drink in advance, and he would then bring it on his next round. Late at night, Amm Ibrahim would also fetch sandwiches. Since there was never a written bill, you had to remember everything you had ordered. If you needed help remembering, Amm Ibrahim would be sure to remind you. The montage area was not exactly paradise. It lacked air-conditioning, and it tended to be messy and dirty. It also reeked of the wax used to mount material on the mock-ups. But it was fun. For many of us, it was a kind of baptism of fire. Staying late in this sweaty room, drinking tea and walking on floors awash with discarded bits of paper, this was something new. The experience brought us together like nothing else. After a few hours spent there, you were no longer just a member of the newspaper's staff. Instead, you were a member of a group, a part of a family. As an English-language newspaper, the Weekly went through several stages of editing and proofreading. No typos, however insignificant, were tolerated. I recall the astonishment displayed by the montage technicians at the insistence of the language editors, including the late Fayza Hassan, on the need to put every last comma and full stop in the right place. However, one thing we couldn't always fix was the fact that some items on the final page lay-out would tilt on final production. At that time, every article and image had to be stuck on a page the same size as that used for the newspaper itself. Sometimes, repeated cutting and pasting would shift material around, or leave it not quite straight. We had to live with that. At the end of the Weekly 's first year, Al-Ahram was moving full steam ahead towards computerisation, and this transition, supervised by Mohamed Taymour Abdel-Hasib, involved the introduction of lay-out and production systems using Apple Macintosh computers and Adobe and Design Studio software. By the end of 1992, the Weekly had moved to a computerised lay-out. Journalists started typing their articles directly onto computers and editors edited directly on screen. Two years after its first issue appeared, the Weekly became the first Egyptian publication to be produced without manual montage and without traditional photographic processing. This evolution in the Weekly 's production process echoed the technological developments taking place in Al-Ahram as a whole. At the time the Weekly was first produced, laying out the paper meant photo composition -- in other words, cutting and pasting. This may seem backward today, but it was actually state-of-the-art technology at the time. Only a few years before, newspapers were still being composed using oversized linotype and intertype machines. Until the 1980s, lay-out used to be a major task for editors and technicians, with the turning point coming with the switch from lead to bromide, a material that allowed newspapers to be produced by cutting and pasting. Once the layout began to take shape on a computer screen, it could then be stored on tape or floppy disc. However, it was only the introduction of Apple Macintosh technology in the early 1990s that made it possible to finish the entire layout on computer, and from that moment on nothing was ever done manually. Such innovations in design are far from being over. In a few days, Al-Ahram, and of course the Weekly, will start laying out its newspapers using new software produced by Adobe InDesign. Technology never ceases to develop, and neither do we.
