About c:four

We are a team of magazine and newspaper publishers, graphic designers and software architects. We were increasingly frustrated with the over-complicated desktop publishing applications on the market. We wanted something better and decided it was time to change things ourselves.

We came to the conclusion that instead of creating a simple one-off desktop publishing application, which could be easily enhanced, we have created an all-encompassing software publishing toolkit. With a publishing toolkit we can create not just one, but many great publishing applications.

Tailored for you

For each application, we therefore focus on customization and the user interface. For example:

A professional graphic designer wants to be in control: to manage the finer details of typography, colour, and of course the layout. Professionals want to see the CMYK separation previews, they want to see the output file from the preflight.

Whereas an office worker who has been tasked with creating a small recruitment advert for their company for insertion in their local newspaper is not an expert in typography, doesn't have a favourite pantone colour and just wants what they see on screen to be printed in the newspaper. They just need an application that picks the best available options for this user and doesn't hassle them with features they don't need to know about. One that preflights and warns the user about any potential errors and produces a print ready PDF/x1a document, that will guarantee what is printed is the same as what is on screen.

We also decided that we needed a platform independent toolkit, capable of working under any operating system or platform; capable of handling a wide variety of users, at the same time, in multiple locations and by working to the Unicode standard, able to operate in all languages.

Having created a software publishing toolkit, we then set about creating our first publishing application from that toolkit; encompassing layout, formatting, font & color management, display & editing including H&J, storage & retrieval, rendering & printing. Our first application using the c:four engine is iStudio Publisher.

For a more indepth analysis of the c:four publishing engine, please see the developers section.