atw: Re: Print-ready in Word

Two questions.

If this book is going to be printed by a commercial printer, why is it being prepared with Word?

If the book is so important that bulk copies are to be printed, it will probably sit on people's shelves for some time. I suggest that it is worth the effort to have it properly typeset by someone who knows the principles of book design. Most books designed by technical writers break lots of typographical rules and look plain awful: we may know how to write them, but we certainly can't design them.

Design and high-quality typesetting of books is something we should leave to others: graphic design companies are full of happy little Quarkheads who can do this stuff better then most of us. (There are of course other possibilities, including the TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt programs, which are free and produce superb results when used by an expert.)

The end result of the design and typesetting process is a single PDF file, which is what many printers prefer as input to their processes.

Preparing impositions and colour separations is the task of the printer, not the book designer or typesetter, and, I maintain, certainly not the writer. Imposition is done by rather expensive software (see, for example, http://www.databasics.com.au/farrukh/ ), as part of the workflow in the printing plant.

If you are not a printer, why would you want to get involved in the workflow of a printing plant, and why would a printer let you do this?

Addendum

On a typography site, I once came across the phrase "... technical manuals and other brutalist publications...". Ouch.


JH







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