NEW FACES

Publishing industry guru joins Avatar

Gary Thompson recently joined Avatar's senior management team as Director of Technology. Gary has over 30 years of experience as a publishing industry technologist, software developer and project manager.

Gary has been the lead on IT projects for Office Max, 84 Lumber, JC Penny, GNC, Boise Technology, the Army National Guard and the National Security Agency, along with many others. The unifying theme of his career is that Gary constantly looks at new and emerging technologies to see if they make sense for his clients. Better solutions are built on better technologies. This has been his mantra since the inception of electronic publishing.

"Emerging technologies stimulate me to think about new ways of communicating that our clients are going to need even before they know they need them," Thompson said. "I also get excited about teaching our customers new ways to think about their products and product information."

Gary recently developed a web-based content management system that allows writers and graphic artists to dynamically update content for projects. The entire workflow, from build, to edit, to approve and deliver, takes place on line. He has also created a distributed learning system that provides an Internet-based sales force with 24-hour access to the most current vendor product information. Not only has the distributed learning system proven to be a highly effective interactive training tool, vendor participation has created a new profit center for the company that deployed it.

In the early days of PostScript 1, Gary opened one of the first service bureaus in the country, Thompson and Thompson and Associates. This required him to treat PostScript as the programming language that it is, and to code in it directly. In those days this was sometimes the only way to fix jobs that wouldn’t run. Getting a feel for the language, he invented his own screening algorithms. When he added more than 13 fonts to his RIP, PageMaker choked. So Gary worked with Aldus to patch PageMaker. The early QuarkXPress PostScript drivers took forever to process complex jobs. So Gary hacked the driver with ResEdit, dropping rip times from an hour to a few minutes. When he showed the results to Quark they hired him as a consultant to bring the improvement to their next release.

In the early releases of Corel Draw, it was notoriously difficult to get complex pages to rip. Corel made Thompson and Thompson their lead US service bureau because Gary could get the job done. Under the name Lupin Software, Gary designed and headed the development of Postscript-based tools for the desktop publishing and service bureau industry. Gary also led consulting teams that used these tools—including Hyper PS Tools and Let’er Rip!™—to develop custom Postscript workflow solutions for clients like the LA Times, Canon Printers, and the New York Times. For years, HP shipped a copy of Hyper PS Tools with every PostScript printer sold. He also developed LaserCheck, a utility that emulated an imagesetter inside a laser printer to test PostScript code without wasting expensive consumables.

In 1990 Gary sat on a panel of 12 PostScript gurus from around the world, including representatives from Adobe. They developed a white paper that charted the future of electronic communications, including page layout applications, PostScript 2, workflows, and what later became PDF. Industry took notice, and their predictions came to pass.