Desktop publishing is the creation, on a personal computer, of a document that combines three applications: page layout (the way the items on a page are arranged), word processing, and graphics. Involved in these aspects of desktop publishing are increasingly popular technologies and applications, such as CD-ROM, multimedia, and 3-D animation.

While desktop publishing incorporates word processing, the two are different processes. Word processing programs work with lines of text, including graphics, which are treated like one large block of text. A word processor operates serially, from top to bottom. Desktop publishing programs work by treating everything as a graphic. Text is a block, instead of a series of lines. Desktop publishing programs are able to merge these opposite functioning processes to produce a final document combining both text and graphics.

Typically, desktop publishing involves importing text that has been generated in a word processing program...