In publishing, deadlines are everything.

General comments

Before he founded , John Ashmead worked as a consultant for a small publishing startup and then for the consulting firm AGS. In the course of these assignments, he did a fair amount of work in publishing.

He consulted for a publishing firm as well as for the internal publishing operations of a large telco, with particular emphasis on automation of previously manual functions. One specific operational analysis assisted the telco in realizing $4,000,000/year of operational savings.

New journals

He automated the typesetting of several new academic and scientific journals for a scholarly and scientific press.

It's Greek to me

He automated the typesetting of concordances to Euripedes. These arrived in Ancient Greek and had to be typeset in the same language.

Debugging version of troff

He created a debugging version of troff, the UNIX typesetting program, to provide complete traces of the macros it was executing at any particular time. This proved invaluable in providing support for a telco's internal and external publishing operations.

Printing automation

He wrote some C utilities to automate the printing at a telco's internal operations. With this, one program replaced hundreds of individual user scripts.