Olav Martin Kvern is a Solutions Architect at Silicon Publishing, where he has worked since 2011. At Adobe he implemented InDesign’s Scripting, IDML, and InDesign Server — the three foundations most InDesign automation still runs on today — and he is the author of “Real World InDesign,” the book that taught a generation of designers the program.
Olav Martin Kvern started working in the graphic arts field after high school, as a veterinary illustrator at the Washington State University School of Veterinary Medicine.
"Drawing dog brains and the insides of mice," he says.
Then he worked across doing illustration, layout, and paste-up across campus at the Holland Library Graphics Lab, and as an archaeological illustrator at the University of Idaho.
"Don't get water on the mummy."
In 1977, he moved to Seattle and did a variety of graphic arts jobs — freelance illustration, graphic design, and typesetting for "The Rocket," a free Rock and Roll newspaper. Kvern automated the production of various sections in the paper — on a Compugraphic EditWriter 8500.
He then took a job doing layout, paste-up, and typesetting for an accounting software firm. The company replaced its traditional typesetting process with an Interleaf system running on a Sun workstation. The system included an Imagen laser printer, which used the Interpress page description language, a precursor of PostScript. Kvern began programming in BASIC and Interpress to automate his Interleaf work. Kvern started an Interleaf user group in Seattle.
In 1985, he bought an original Macintosh, and began incorporating MacPaint graphics into his illustration work. He worked for Microsoft on art for the self-running demo program for Excel, and did sample art for the first release of Microsoft Mouse.
In 1987, Kvern joined Aldus as a documentation designer and supervisor of the group that produced manuals for all Aldus products. In 1989, he moved to the PageMaker engineering team. He helped design (with Debra Kosky, nee Borgatti) PageMaker's Control panel, and started promoting PageMaker's scripting support.
While working at Aldus, Kvern wrote "Real World PageMaker," with Steve Roth, and "Real World FreeHand," about the drawing program (developed by Altsys and marketed by Aldus). He also started writing for the newly-created Aldus Magazine. His column, "Desktop Science," was a popular feature for the magazine, and for Adobe Magazine, after Aldus was acquired by Adobe.
"Desktop Science" frequently featured articles on automating publishing processes using AppleScript, PostScript, and various forms of VBScript/Visual Basic for Applications.
"It just didn't feel like a Desktop Science column without a little bit of code in it."
Kvern then moved to a company founded by Jeremy Jaech, Dave Walter, and Ted Johnson, all ex-Aldus engineers. They'd started a company named Axon, then Shapeware, and, finally Visio. Visio is a business drawing program — for creating flow charts, network diagrams, organizational charts, etc. Kvern's title was "ShapeMaster," and his task was programming the intelligence into Visio's "Smart Shapes." Visio is now part of Microsoft.
After Visio 1.0 shipped, during Visio 2.0 development, Kvern started to feel that his work on the product was significantly done.
"Time to ride to another town that needs a new sheriff."
He started working as an art director for Peachpit Press, and designed a number of Peachpit Press titles. "Icons for the Masses," about designing icons for the Macintosh using ResEdit, remains his favorite.
Kvern then started a software development company, also named "Desktop Science." Working with Debra Kosky again, he worked on the PageTools and VectorTools plug-ins (both from Extensis) and created a database publishing plug-in for FreeHand for Wizards of the Coast.
In 1999, Kvern was hired by Adobe as a contract programmer/writer to work on InDesign scripting. This led to a full-time position in 2000 on the InDesign team in Adobe's Developer Technologies group. His job was to document InDesign scripting, produce example scripts, and evangelize publishing automation.
While working on a script for converting InDesign files to InDesign J (Japanese) files, Kvern implemented what was to become IDML, and worked on the specification for the second version of the format. He also implemented InDesign Server, and advocated for its creation through a long discussion with Adobe's legal department.
Kvern sees InDesign scripting as a tool for all InDesign users — not just developers with Computer Science degrees. To that end, he taught many seminars on scripting for graphic artists, and created a forum for InDesign scripting that quickly became the destination for a growing InDesign automation community.
"The graphic arts are supposed to be a creative field, but we spend most of our time doing laborious, repetitive tasks under intense time pressure. Scripting and automation give us a way to spend less time on the boring stuff, and get back to being creative."
While employed at Adobe, he wrote "Real World InDesign 1.5," collaborating with David Blatner on subsequent editions.
In 2011, Kvern joined Silicon Publishing, and has helped with almost every product release since then. He's particularly proud of creating a system that can round-trip InDesign typesetting to HTML 5 (in Silicon Designer) and back again.
