Having worked at Western Business Publishing for the last 20 of IPE's 25 years, I have been directly responsible for producing IPE magazine for most of its life. In that time, the processes and technologies used have changed dramatically.

I was lucky enough to arrive on the scene just after we consigned pasting-up bromides to the scrapheap (finished print from a phototypesetting machine printed on shiny photographic paper). In their place we had shiny new Apple Macintosh computers which typically cost a king's ransom, but looked gorgeous.

Our editorial team, led by Karl Lacey would supply the production department with text in a microsoft word document, which would be laid out in QuarkXpress on the Apple Macs. QuarkXpress was the de facto standard in desktop publishing at the time, and even though Adobe's Indesign software has since captured much of the publishing market – we still use QuarkXpress today to produce all magazines at Western Business Publishing.

All advertisements used to be supplied to us in 4-colour separated films which had to be sent to our 'repro house' to build into finished magazine advertising pages – again in separated films.

We would send the hundreds of editorial product images as either photographic prints or transparencies to be digitally scanned at the repro house on a drum scanner which cost upwards of £100,000. I remember proofing editorial pages over the fax machine, to check whether the right image was in the correct place on the page – which was always a struggle as often the faxes were barely legible!

The finished editorial and advertising pages would again be output in 4-colour separated films and sent to the printers to make lithographic plates.

All change

All this changed in 2001 with the advent of computer-to-plate (CTP) technology. The ability to image a high resolution Portable Document File (PDF) directly on a lithographic printing plate revolutionised the production process. Out went expensive repro house page makeup and scanning. Out went waxy fax paper proofs of editorial pages. We purchased some flatbed scanners, and were now able to scan all images in house. We stopped accepting adverts as separated films, and only accepted digital adverts. This meant we could produce the entire magazine digitally, right there on the Apple Mac.

I distinctly remember the first issue we sent to print from a PDF file we produced in house. The file size was tiny – just 30 or so megabytes. It was inconceivable that the entire issue could be produced from one tiny file but, sure enough, the revolution took hold, and we never looked back.

Today, we've stopped receiving adverts on floppy disc, over the ISDN (remember those?) or on CD – and our flatbed scanners have long since been retired. All advertising material comes to us on email as high resolution PDFs.

Our editorial systems are design so that articles are published online first and then brought into QuarkXpress to produce pages ready for print. This means that potentially a new product release can be online the day it is received and then appear in the next print version of the magazine.

The future will deliver even more production automation, with content being delivered over an increasing number of platforms such as apps and social media. That, or robots will have taken over and we'll all be redundant!