MEPS—An Exciting Leap Forward in Publishing
YOU MAY have noticed on page two of this magazine that Awake! is published in 51 languages. Its companion magazine The Watchtower is published in 102 languages. Altogether about 40 million copies of these magazines are printed each month of the year.
In addition, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society publishes books and booklets that explain the Bible in over 165 languages, printing tens of millions of such publications every year. Have you ever thought of what is involved in producing all this literature in these scores of languages? It is a large and involved task.
The magazines and books are first published in English, and then it generally takes three to six months before the same information appears in other language editions of the magazines. And when it comes to books, often it is years before they can be published in some of the languages in which readers are eagerly awaiting them. But MEPS is now making a difference.
What Is MEPS? Why Was It Made?
MEPS is an abbreviation that stands for Multilanguage Electronic Phototypesetting System. It is a system that Jehovah’s Witnesses themselves have developed for getting written material published quickly in many languages. They developed MEPS because nowhere in the world was such a system available for publishing in the many languages in which they print their Bible literature.
Why was such a multilanguage publishing system unavailable anywhere in the world? Simply stated, because most printing is done for profit, and there was not sufficient monetary return to cover the cost of developing a computerized system for producing literature in many of the languages in which publications of the Watchtower Society are produced. But Jehovah’s Witnesses do not print for profit. Their sole objective in printing Bible literature is to help people of all nations and languages to learn about Jehovah God and his Kingdom government.—Matthew 6:9, 10; 24:14.
Actually no organization in the world was in a better position than were Jehovah’s Witnesses to develop a multilanguage publishing system. Why? Because Jehovah’s Witnesses have regularly been translating material into over 165 languages. Therefore, from their own translators they also could obtain the necessary language information to produce MEPS.
Industry Changes That Led to MEPS
As many readers know, the publishing industry has been revolutionized by new methods of production during the past 20 years or so. Ever since the last century, operators of linotype machines turned hot, molten lead into single one-piece lines of metal type. These lines of metal type, called slugs, were then arranged into pages by a compositor. From these pages of metal type, molds were made for casting heavy lead printing plates that were used on rotary letterpresses.
In the early 1960’s, by far the majority of newspapers, magazines and books were printed on letterpresses. Today practically none are. The method of printing with type produced from hot lead became obsolete almost overnight. Any factories using hot lead, if they wanted to continue printing, were soon forced to change with the industry. Thus practically all printing of newspapers, magazines and books is now done on lithographic offset presses.
In January 1978, printing on rotary offset presses was begun at the headquarters printery of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Brooklyn, New York. The first publication was the color-illustrated My Book of Bible Stories. In offset printing the image to be printed is not raised as it is in letterpress, but it is on the same plane, or level, as the surface that surrounds it.a This method of printing is accomplished by taking a photograph of the printed page and then using the film produced to make thin offset printing plates.
To make these thin offset printing plates to produce My Book of Bible Stories and other literature published by the Watchtower Society, photographs had to be taken of proofs of linotype-produced pages. The film negatives were then merged with negatives of the pictures or illustrations. It was this slow, mechanical, prepress system of producing type from hot lead that needed to be replaced by some faster method. A group of Jehovah’s Witnesses investigated how to do this.
A Two-Team Effort
These Witnesses saw the urgency of developing a computerized, prepress system for the Brooklyn headquarters printery. At the same time they appreciated also the need to develop a multilanguage prepress system for use in the many printing branches of Jehovah’s Witnesses around the world.
To meet these needs, one team of Witnesses began work in Brooklyn on a system that employed a large IBM mainframe computer as well as IBM text entry terminals and an Autologic corporation phototypesetter. Nearly a hundred miles away at Watchtower Farms near Wallkill, New York, the other team started work on an in-house-produced system they called MEPS.
In Brooklyn the team developed excellent programs, or software, using principally IBM equipment, or hardware. IBM later called this program the “Integrated Publishing System,” or IPS. The respected Seybold Report on Publishing Systems, Volume 12, No. 1, September 13, 1982, commented:
“IBM is trying once again to increase its presence in the industry, and the vehicle by which it hopes to do so is an interesting package called the ‘Integrated Publishing System’ (IPS). IPS was not developed by IBM,” the report acknowledges, but “[by] Watchtower, the publishing arm of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, where it was created primarily for their internal use.”
Like MEPS, IPS is a multilanguage system, expandable to handle any of the world’s languages. Publications in over 90 languages have already been produced at Brooklyn headquarters using IPS. Because of its size and flexibility, some 140 terminals use the system with instant access to its data base of shared information.
In concluding its report, Seybold said: “We have nothing but praise for the enterprise, initiative and insightfulness of the Watchtower people. There are few today either ambitious enough or courageous enough to undertake such an application, especially virtually from scratch. . . . We don’t know just how the credit should be parcelled out, but they all deserve a lot of kudos.”
A Description of MEPS
In the meantime the Witness team at Watchtower Farms was involved in an even more challenging project—they were not using IBM’s or any other commercial firm’s computer hardware but were actually building all the principal equipment themselves. In the picture on page 21 you can see the various parts of the equipment that make up MEPS. Most of these were built by Jehovah’s Witnesses at Watchtower Farms.
The heart of the system is the MEPS computer, housed within a compact, handsome frame approximately 40 inches (1016 mm) high, 36 inches (914 mm) wide and 34 inches (864 mm) deep. Inside, hundreds of tiny silicon chips, with intricate electronic circuitry, provide the computer with the capacity to handle all the activity of four graphics terminals called work stations.
One of these work stations is also shown. It is composed of a familiar but enlarged typewriter keyboard and a graphics display screen. The display screen is approximately the size and shape of a page of the Awake! or the Watchtower magazine. The keyboard has its own 16-bit microcomputer to control the 182 keys. Each key has five shift levels that provide the equivalent of 910 keys to represent commands, characters or combination commands.
The work station is designed to perform two basic functions. The first function, or operation, is to enter written text. In other words, the terminal serves basically as a typewriter, only the entered text appears on the screen rather than on a piece of paper. If a printout of a document is needed, a nearby printer (similar to a high-speed typewriter) can be activated to type out on regular sheets of paper everything that has been entered. Such material can then be editorially read or proofread in the usual way.
Remember now, MEPS is a multilanguage system. Its uniqueness is in its ability to handle many different languages. By typing a simple command, this same keyboard can be electronically altered so that text can be entered in any desired language for which it has been programmed. There is essentially no limit to the number of languages that MEPS can be programmed to produce. Presently the system has been programmed for the entry of over 130 languages.
Let’s look at the second basic function of the work station. After the written text in any language has been entered, by a few simple keystrokes the function of the work station can be altered so that a page of the publication can be composed right at the same work station. Any selected type face, or font, in the desired size can be assigned to any portion of the written text. Also, boxes can be drawn to identify the exact areas where text, titles, pictures, charts and captions will appear. Then, when ready, the written text is “poured” into the text boxes and around areas reserved for illustrations. Note the sample of an Awake! page on the graphics display terminal as shown on the opposite page.
After a publication has been composed on the display terminal, how is it transferred from there in such a form that the printing plates for the offset presses can be produced? This is accomplished by the MEPS phototypesetter. It is housed in a 42-inch-high (1067 mm) by 33.5-inch-wide (851 mm) by 32-inch-deep (813 mm) cabinet that matches the rest of the MEPS hardware. The phototypesetter produces an image on photographic paper by using a tiny beam of light as a very small paint brush, much the same way as a television set produces an image on its screen. After the photographic paper is processed, it is photographed to produce film that, in turn, is used to make offset printing plates.
Designing Type With MEPS
To print in any given language, its alphabet must have various type faces, or fonts, such as bold or italic. On page 2 of this magazine, for instance, you will see a variety of type fonts. During the past two years, MEPS has been used to produce type fonts for over a hundred different languages. How are these type fonts made?
An artist first draws a letter, or character. Then that character is viewed by a TV camera that converts the letter into a configuration of tiny dots shown on a TV screen. The pattern of these dots is registered and then transmitted electronically to the MEPS computer. Afterward the character is edited on the MEPS screen by adding or detracting dots and the ready-to-use character is stored in the computer for use as needed.
An Impressive Accomplishment
At the time of writing, over 25 MEPS units and two phototypesetters had been built. Already MEPS units have been installed in Germany, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Greece, Britain, the Philippines and France. Soon units will also be shipped to many other countries throughout the world.
When MEPS arrived in Greece late last summer, the customs officials asked: “Who built this computer?”
“We did—Jehovah’s Witnesses in America,” they were told. But they didn’t believe it. However, when a Seybold Report was shown to them, they were not only convinced but shook their heads in amazement. In the Seybold article last summer about MEPS, the writer explained:
“Visiting Watchtower Farms. We had a chance to see some of the new features that are under development when we visited Watchtower Farms. Watchtower Farms is, as the name implies, a farming center which produces food for its own consumption and for the Watchtower group in Brooklyn. But a lot of other Watchtower work goes on there as well. It is, like Brooklyn, a major printing and mailing facility. Several hundred people [actually over 800] live and work there.
“The facilities for hardware and software development at Watchtower Farms are very impressive. Assembly-language programming is done on a networked group of Intel development systems. A well-equipped prototyping lab is used for hardware work. Nearby are finished systems on which new software can be tested and new users trained.
“New software. We were shown a variety of new features that are under development. Support for Hebrew, Arabic, and other right-to-left languages is being developed, with the appropriate changes in cursor movement, etc., being demonstrable at the time we visited. The system was explicitly designed with Watchtower’s multi-lingual publishing activities in mind, and has quite a few language-related features, including a totally redefinable keyboard . . . In addition, the character repertoire is large enough potentially to cope with languages (like Japanese and Chinese) which have tens of thousands of separate characters.
“To handle the endless variations in hyphenation practice around the world, Watchtower has developed a questionnaire to elicit these rules which it sends to its offices in each country. Based on the questionnaire, it then develops the proper combination of tables, algorithms, and exception lists to cope with that language. . . .
“The typesetter project. The Watchtower Farms group has also put together a prototype typesetter.”
Working With MEPS
For over a year now, Witnesses from more than 20 countries around the world have been coming in to Watchtower Farms for training in operating MEPS. Because of the equipment’s simplicity of design, it has been taking people familiar with typing and composition procedures only about two weeks to become proficient both at text entry and page composition. Other people have stayed longer and received training in the maintenance of the equipment. Thus when MEPS arrived in Greece, one of the trained personnel from Germany traveled over to install it.
Presently MEPS is being used to produce The Watchtower and Awake! in such languages as Ukrainian, Arabic, Hungarian, Polish, German, Samoan, Greek and Maltese, and, in time, will be used for publishing these journals in dozens of other languages. Bibles, books and booklets are also produced using the MEPS computer. In a large branch such as Germany, for instance, all the steps are done, from the entry of the translated German text into MEPS to the printing of the finished publication. Germany had been using a commercial phototypesetter until a MEPS typesetter became available.
Other branches that do not do their own printing send to a printing branch, such as Germany, a thin MEPS “floppy disk” onto which they have recorded their composed publication. There the disk is inserted into the MEPS equipment; the publication is phototypeset, printing plates are made, and the publication is printed and then shipped to the branch ordering it.
Today MEPS is reducing the time that it takes to get publications printed in other languages. Consider, for example, the eagerly awaited 256-page publication You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth. Soon after it was released in English in the summer of 1982, it was translated into Arabic. But the problem then was in getting the translated material ready for printing. How would it be done, since the hot-metal process had almost been phased out?
It would take many weeks to type the translated text on a linotype machine and then compose the thin metal slugs into pages. Opportunely the MEPS had just been programmed for the right-to-left Arabic language. So in two weeks last autumn the entire book was typed into the MEPS system. Then, on the MEPS terminal, it was composed and prepared for final proofreading and subsequent printing. The Arabic Witness who operated MEPS explained one way it made the work so much faster and easier.
“Arabic letters are written in four different ways depending upon where they appear in a word or sentence,” he said. “If a letter appears at the beginning of a word, it is written one way, if in the middle of a word, it is written another way, if at the end of the word, yet another way, and if the letter stands by itself in the sentence, it is written in yet a fourth way. An Arabic linotype must have different keys for all of the scores of different variations of the 22 Arabic letters that are written in the four different ways. But MEPS was programmed so that only one keystroke is needed for each Arabic letter. The machine automatically determines, by the position of that letter in the word or sentence, the correct way to write it. As you can imagine, this makes the entering of text on MEPS much easier and faster.”
MEPS is indeed making publishing in many languages easier. It is unique in that it was not developed for commercial use, even though many commercial businesses have been impressed with its capabilities. As time goes on, MEPS will no doubt be used to a much greater extent in preparing Bible literature to help people of all nations and languages to learn about Jehovah God and his Kingdom government.
As this magazine was being prepared, the Watchtower Society decided to phase in the use of MEPS for its publishing system in Brooklyn. This will lay the basis for a completely compatible publishing system between the Brooklyn headquarters and all of the publishing branches around the world. The next issue of this magazine will be composed into final pages on MEPS.
[Footnotes]
a For more information on lithographic offset printing, see the article “Lithography—Today’s Popular Printing Process,” on pages 24-6 of the August 22, 1972, Awake!
[Blurb on page 22]
There is essentially no limit to the number of languages that MEPS can be programmed to produce
[Pictures on page 21]
1. MEPS Computer
2. Printer
3. Graphics Display Screen
4. Keyboard
5. MEPS Phototypesetter
[Pictures on page 24]
After text entry the article can be composed into pages at the same work station, as seen here
[Picture on page 25]
In type digitizing the visual image of the character (1) is picked up by the TV camera (2), converted into a configuration of dots on the TV screen (3), transmitted to the computer screen (4), fine tuned and then stored in the computer (5) for use