LIKE most publications, the Morning Star relies heavily on Adobe software. We crop, edit and process photographs in Adobe Photoshop, design graphics with Adobe Illustrator, lay out pages on Adobe InDesign and convert them to PDFs, another Adobe creation, to send to our printers at Watford and Oldham.

The software world has changed in recent years, with Adobe switching from “Creative Suites” which customers bought, providing permanent licences for the use of an array of programmes, to the “Creative Cloud” through which software is effectively leased. Previously, customers would receive updates to the software package they had bought until it was replaced by the next one (Creative Suite 3 by CS4, CS4 by CS5, and so on). If you had an old version, you wouldn’t receive updates and it would gradually become more problematic to use as bugs were not fixed and incompatibility with more modern systems grew. 

Six years ago Adobe announced it would no longer release suites at all, with users instead leasing Creative Cloud licences that are updated without the purchase of new packages. The Morning Star, perennially strapped for cash, of course continued to use its last version of Creative Suite (CS4), living with the fact that the software would no longer be updated. But this did mean incremental updates of either our software or hardware became impossible. When a computer broke and was replaced with a newer one, we found old software ran erratically or not at all on the newer machine. Problems connected with this for a time caused serious malfunctions affecting the generation of our e-edition, which many frustrated Star readers will remember all too well.