\title{Cheltenham Effect}
Cheltenham sounded an idyllic setting for a joint meeting of the 
BCS ep Group and the UK \TeX\ Users Group at the end of May, but
lapping the town's one-way system in search of venue and parking place was
not the perfect way to start the day. It did not take long to recover, however,
the meeting being an interesting one, with a rather different approach and
content to usual Group meetings.

The theme was Cheltenham's emergence as a centre of many high-tech
suppliers of equipment and services to the publishing industry. It was
surprising to hear from the first speaker, Derek Kyte of Chelgraph, that
this all came about by accident. Linotype, the catalyst of the Cheltenham
Effect, had sent a team to investigate prospective sites in Wales. They
stopped in Cheltenham on the return journey to report a lack of success to
the Managing Director and during that meeting it was decided to set up in
Cheltenham instead.

There was no reason to rue the decision; Linotype's Cheltenham operation
was successful, at one time employing 1100 people. The demise came when
Linotype became part of a multi-national conglomerate and was acquired by
Allied Chemicals, which then sought to rationalise operations by making 500
R\&D people redundant at the Cheltenham site. This pool of talent was the
source of many new companies, including Chelgraph, QED, Bitstream, Quorum,
Chubb Instrumentation, Highwater Designs, Upfront, and Ntg2000.

Linotype's workforce was cut back severely, but the company continues to
make its mark internationally. Tony Lock described what the company is
doing at Special Projects (Non-Latin Scripts). The Letraset DTP packages,
ReadySetGo! and Design Studio, have been adapted to provide \PS\
solutions for non-Latin scripts. This approach incidentally was first
pursued by Diwan. Seven arabic and eleven Indian languages are now
available with three more under development.

Chris Jordan of Chelgraph compared the approach of successful companies in
the early 1980s with the current trend. At one time leading companies tried
to sell every type of product to everyone and marketed proprietary
hardware. Standardisation and Open Systems have changed this. Now the most
successful companies are those which concentrate on particular market
niches.

Tim Hawkins and Andy Thomason of Ntg2000 outlined their company's work. Ntg
stands for `New Technology Group' and they have two market areas: newspaper
editorial systems and software RIPs. The latter would have the advantage
of being faster than presently available \PS\ RIPs. Ntg is a spin-off
from LaserMaker, the Nottingham-based installer of editorial and page
make-up systems.


Andy Buxton of Highwater Designs explained that the company had been formed
by personnel leaving Xenotron following its takeover by Hell (hence the
name: Come Hell or\dots). Its main activities are in the graphics 
area, providing interfaces for Linotronic, PelBox and Ultra imagesetters.
Compared to a purely DTP approach on the one hand and high-cost graphics
packages on the other, Andy claimed that his company's products
can offer both cost advantages and high-quality output.


In contrast to these technical talks, Steven Blake of the Cheltenham Art
Gallery and Museum gave a potted industrial history of the town. For
several hundred years it had been a centre for small specialised
industries. The present crop of high-tech companies continues this
tradition.


After a very good lunch visits were made to Linotype and Quorum, while
Chelgraph demonstrated its A3 printer at the hall. At Linotype, the
adaptation of Design Studio for Arabic was demonstrated and the development
work on fonts was shown.


Quorum showed their production facilities, which include origination,
typesetting and printing. A speciality is the acceptance of text in
electronic form, either on disk or via modem. The facilities available on
the Intermedia system were comprehensively demonstrated.


All in all a very enjoyable day, despite the intricacies of the town's
traffic system. One good thing -- the Gold Cup was not being run!
\author{Henry Holloway}