Jon Freeman:

As mentioned above, the "printer ready" files produced by Quark, Pagemaker, Framemaker, or TEX, are only needed, or of use, if you are paying for 5,000 or more copies of the "book." (The minimum number will vary with who does if for you, but will be large.)

For a project like you seem to be describing, you need to find a reasonably good scanner to make bitmap, tif, or (if you're really serious) eps "reproductions" of the cards.

Postcards are quite variable in print quality, but nearly all will be "screened" prints, so you need to look into a good graphics program to clean the pictures up. Conversion of color pictures to good "grayscale" is the core skill you need for your project as described.

Once you have "clean" picture files, you can paste them into any good word processor or page layout program. My own choice, as described above, would be Word. My S.O. would do it in Pagemaker, but that's really overkill. Word (any recent version) is sufficient for everything you described.

If you wanted to print the colors, a good "photo quality" inkjet printer will do a reasonable job, and you can pretty much "self-produce" your own book. If you're satisfied with B/W, a laser printer would be "first choice." I would personally opt for a PostScript capable laser printer, and use .eps graphics, but you can do a fine job with bitmaps and a lesser printer. Your real problem though, is to get the pictures in good (electronic) shape.

500 copies is a very short run for a book printing shop. Realistically, unless you can find a "vanity press" publisher that's interested, you're talking about a "copy shop" job. What you need is a good master copy of the unbound pages that can be copied - and a long talk with the shop about the best way to bind them.

A traditional "old saw" in the computer wonk world is "it's in Knuth." Donald Knuth set out many years ago to produce a series of books that would contain "everything known about computing, in five volumes." When he ran into some difficulty with getting his books set up and printed, he diverted his energies to creating "the ideal markup language," which was/is/continues as TEX. Most of the "everything" that's "in Knuth" is in one of the volumes that never (yet) got published.

Incidentally, you know it's a "wonk" language because you can't actually type it correctly (at least not easily in html). It is spelled "Upper Case TAU, Small Cap Subscript EPSILON, Upper Case CHI." When Mr. Knuth started his inventing, that was "very hard" in common word processors, or even in "typesetting" programs, so the name is "symbolic."

Tex is widely used in a few places. Some universities, especially where the computer systems are mainly Unix, do use it routinely for internal stuff. Some academic journals require submittals in Tex, so if you're writing something for, e.g., the Journal of the American Mathematical Association you'll need it. There are a few book publishers that accept Tex documents, but they seem to be mostly limited to "academic" text publishers. For "small" runs such as you anticipate, it will be difficult to find anyone who wants "file input," and less than 10% of those will be able to handle Tex - unless you're at a university.

You might be interested in Tex Users Group, and to keep this on a musical note MusicTex.

I have bookmarked the TEX Home, but it seems not to be responding just now. Clicky posted just in case it comes back.

If you are interested in Tex as an "academic exercise," by all means study it. It should be rewarding. You DON'T need it for what you described - unless and until you have found a printer who wants it.

It is, incidentally, not really correct to say - as appeared above - "Tex will print [insert any description]" Tex is a markup language. You describe, mostly, the "function" of individual "text elements." What prints is determined (like in html) by a Document Type Description which your print shop can change - or simply mess up - to change what your book looks like. Journals like it, because you tell them "this is a section heading." They get to determine that it's 14 point TimesNewRoman, compressed 30 percent, outline font filled grey, underlined, with 5 p leading, when they apply the DTD and print it. Makes for uniformity in the Journal, and they can change "all documents" with a "stroke of the pen" by revising the DTD. The result, however, depends specifically on the DTD used for a given printing.

On the simple stuff: If you have MS Works, you have a word processor, but it is NOT Word. The stripped down WP in Works is a very good program, if it meets your needs; but it has no place in a "real world" word processing environment. You should have at least Word For Windows 6.0 (obsolete), and preferably Word 7.0, Word 97 SR1, Word 2000, or WordXP (grit teeth) if you really want to do anything very sophisticated.

Even if you do decide to use Tex (or Pagemaker, Quark, Framemaker) you probably want to make a layout in Word first (kind of like prepping an html post).

John