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12 Mar 06 - 03:41 AM (#1691052) Subject: Tech: Publishing Software From: Amergin Has anyone here used any of the publishing software that is out there? Which ones would you recommend? How about ease of use? |
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12 Mar 06 - 08:15 AM (#1691137) Subject: RE: Tech: Publishing Software From: JohnInKansas Assuming that you're meaning "professional" publishing of some sort, the answer on ease of use is easiest. Anything you know, thouroughly, how to do well, is "easy." All of the major "publishing" programs require significant amounts of study to be used at all with any real competence, but once you've learned how, the reasons that they're different from simpler software is because they make it "easy" to do common kinds of publishing work. Anyone who has used a particular publishing program enough to know how to use it with some fluency likely will tell you that "their program" is the only one that's any good. You will find few people proficient enough with more than one of these programs to make really useful, and fairly unbiased, comparisons between them. The choice of which program to use depends strongly on "who's your publisher." If you're intending to produce bound books, and will work with conventional production shops, many of the "book houses" have demanded that the ready-to-print job be produced on a specific program. Recently, in the past several years, some but not all of the volume printers have become significantly more flexible about accepting jobs in a variety of program formats. In many places there has been quite a lot of "tradition" associated with which program should be used, depending on what kind of publications you worked on. "Academic Press" houses tended to use one group of programs, while "Literary Press" houses tended to prefer somewhat other ones. "Journal Press" - the ones who do techical and professional books and magazines often specify different programs, and some professional societies can be quite rigid about demanding a specific one. Magazine publishers choose differently than those who produce books. If you're in an "education environment" such as a university, the preferences are significantly different than elsewhere simply because of the much more universal use of "mainframe computer systems," which produces a preference for different programs than where most of the work is done on "unconnected" PCs and Macs. If you are "thinking about writing a book," and expect to be working with a conventional large publisher, the emphatic answer to which publishing program you should use is NONE. The layout, formatting, and compositing of professionally produced books should be done by the professionals. Authors should submit unformatted plain text manuscripts and not muck them up by trying to make them look "pretty." Someone will have to figure out and undo all your "pretty stuff" so you should stick to a plain word processor and avoid getting fancy. If you're intending to work with a smaller "indie" publisher, or intend to self-publish, you may want, or need, to put your work in a formatted form, and may need, or at least may benefit from a publishing program; but even there you'll probably find it easiest to use a word processor for composing your work and import it into a publishing program only for final formatting and layout. If you may be thinking about those "office publishing" programs, then it doesn't make much difference, since those are for making viewfoils that managers can use to obscure the lack of content in a bunch of canned "prettiness" for dog-and-pony shows. 'taint "publishing." Although you're likely to get lots of recommendations, you won't get useful ones until you provide a bit more information on why, and for what purposes, and in what publishing context you think you will use a publishing program. John |
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12 Mar 06 - 11:02 AM (#1691251) Subject: RE: Tech: Publishing Software From: Peter K (Fionn) Amergin, if you are thinking of publishing in print to wide audiences you will need to look at Pagemaker from Adobe and QuarkXpress. These two tended to leapfrog each other for several years as the industry standard, capable of handling everything from fliers and newsletters to newspapers and coffee-table books. Pagemaker got off to the quicker start, but on the whole Quark has kept its nose in front. Pagemaker was written for both the PC and Mac platforms from early on, whereas Quark came to PCs relatively late. Adobe, with its comprehensive suite of programs, some of them industry-standard, has deep roots in all aspects of digital printing and publishing - from fonts and font-handling (they were in at the start of postscript fonts) through graphics (Illustrator, Photoshop etc) through to data exporting (Acrobat). For some time they were deemed to be better on cross-platform issues, but Quark has been running in both environments for several years and has sorted most of the cross-platform problems. These programs are fantastically powerful, but it is not difficult to learn your way into the relatively small areas of them that you would need to exploit. Although you would be using only a tiny part of a huge package, you would probably find it a better experience than messing around with a micky-mouse program which is likely to have been developed for utter computing illiterates. |
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12 Mar 06 - 03:53 PM (#1691436) Subject: RE: Tech: Publishing Software From: Geoff the Duck I would echo comments already made. Your first step is to define your situation and the final product you wish to produce. The end product can define the requirements of what you need to use. Any professional programe will have some things which are easy to use once you know what you are doing (well - apart from anything Microsoft make - they just make THEM as difficult as possible, usually because they are produced by people trying to copy and steal somebody else's ideas, but without any real understanding of what they have been stealing), but the features on offer might be beyond what you require. I used to produce a non-comercial magazine using a Commodore Amiga and a DTP programme. I do not know the professional PC or MAC suites, but certain principles carry over. I always found it easiest to write items as flat text. Write and save different sections of content as separate files, that way things remain compact enough to check through and correct or update. Formatting the text was the last thing done before printing. Depending on the end product, it might well be better to leave the final processing to "the professionals" rather than doing that bit yourself. If you are paying for printing, it might be an unneccessary expense to buy software to do what the printers will do as an inclusive part of their fee. Quack! Geoff the Duck. |
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12 Mar 06 - 04:19 PM (#1691456) Subject: RE: Tech: Publishing Software From: Malcolm Douglas Like a good few other people here, I've prepared material for publication at all three levels: domestic printing, desktop publishing via commercial printers, and professional publishing via the usual designer - repro house - printer chain. What you need in terms of software depends largely on which of the above you are considering. |
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12 Mar 06 - 04:27 PM (#1691458) Subject: RE: Tech: Publishing Software From: Bat Goddess Yes, PageMaker was a player from git go, but Adobe (who bought it years ago from Aldus) hasn't supported it for two or three years. Adobe InDesign took over PageMaker's publishing capabilities and incorporated (quite seamlessly) elements of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Adobe developed InDesign as a Quark killer and, I think, have more or less succeeded. (Especially since Quark, in many ways more powerful than PageMaker, has always had mostly nonexistent customer support.) Also, InDesign sort of sits on top of Acrobat language so it's native export. All three programs, though, are quite a bit more than non graphics professionals need. And most publishers want documents in 12 point New Times Roman in MSWord, basically unformatted. Linn |
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12 Mar 06 - 04:29 PM (#1691459) Subject: RE: Tech: Publishing Software From: Rasener Wow its good to see such comments which I fully endorse. There is nothing more annoying than to receive formatted text, which has to be altered for final publishing. Very often, it is an attempt by the person creating the document to try and show what they know about the application, rather than what they know about DTP. My wife is a translator and she translates without formatting for most translation houses, as they have their own DTP experts who know what their customers need in terms of presentation. My wifes job is to translate from English into Dutch, not make it look pretty (which she doesn't get paid for) Everyone to their own skills |
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12 Mar 06 - 06:32 PM (#1691515) Subject: RE: Tech: Publishing Software From: Amergin Sorry....for self publishing...a collection of poetry and stories. I want something that will permit me to layit out the way I want it...maybe add a photo or two...and then I can send to a shop for actual printing and binding. |
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12 Mar 06 - 06:41 PM (#1691524) Subject: RE: Tech: Publishing Software From: Malcolm Douglas Then it depends on what the "shop" wants. Do they work from digital files (and, if so, what kind?) or do they scan a master copy printed by you? The latter approach is becoming more rare, largely because the results tend to be inferior, but it's worth mentioning. |
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13 Mar 06 - 04:46 AM (#1691793) Subject: RE: Tech: Publishing Software From: JohnInKansas As already indicated, the most important thing you can do, before you start "making it look like you want it" is to find a publisher, or a printer/binder, that might be interested in doing the final production for you, and find out what is acceptable to them. Many of the smaller houses will accept small jobs as Word files, and unless you have something really exotic in mind, there is no reason you can't make it look *any-way-you-want-it-to in Word. All that's required is that you learn how to use Word instead of just typing in it. (I would suggest one of the recent one or two versions of Word, if this turns out to be an option: Word 2000 or later(?).) * The things that the "pro" programs can do, that Word doesn't do well or that are difficult to do in Word, likely are things you won't think of doing if you try to do the layout yourself. (Fine tuning of leading and kerning, for example, to eliminate "rivers" in the word breaks, and to manage widow/orphan control, etc.) While you are doing your research on the production requirements, I'd suggest that you go ahead and do the writing, with each chapter in a separate file, consistently named so that you can easily know which is which. Any graphics/artwork you may want to use should also be saved, preferably in a separate folder to go with the chapter in which it will appear. Study up on how to create a "Master Document" and how to get your Table of Contents into it, or in an "Intro" chapter. Create no more than about 5 or 6 paragraph styles, with sample paragraphs in each style that you can use to show a layout person what you have in mind. Select not more than three typefaces (fonts)that you might use, so that your layout person has an idea of what "look" you want. One font will be for everything except specific, and limited, special features. Chapter and section titles sometimes use a different font. Quotes and/or comments, maybe another, but be very careful about being overly creative with them. If the layout person ends up being you, all you'll have to do is apply the styles and insert the graphics and you'll pretty much be done, if you've set them up right. (But don't forget to have at least two other people proofread it before you go to print.) If you really feel the need, go ahead and make a separate folder with "formatted" copies of all your chapters, but do keep the plain ones just in case. John |
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13 Mar 06 - 05:36 AM (#1691821) Subject: RE: Tech: Publishing Software From: Geoff the Duck Echoing what has just been said by JohnInKansas do all your writing as separate files in plain unformatted text (one file for each poem or story). Nothing wrong with something such as Windoze Wordpad although it doesn't have the inbuilt spell checking that fully featured wordprocessors have. That said, at various times mudcatters have recomended different free standing spell checkers as being good. If you are using a specialist vocabulary, you might want to use a checker which you can customise with extra additions. The big downfall of using a word processor is that you can get a series of pages which print off okay, but then you need to alter one item on the first page. You then find that it has turned one line of text into two lines, knocked the bottom line from that page onto the next one and changed the layout of every consecutive page. Desk Top Publishing allows you to make small corrections to prevent this happening (e.g. it can squash all the letters within a paragraph together so you don't notice, but it will keep the last word on the line rather than it starting a fresh one). It also allows you to make text flow to where you want it (e.g. story continues p4 col3) rather than where the wordprocessor wants. As for output - you need to discuss with the printer or publisher what they can most usefully handle. Are you loking at a document in black and white or in colour? What kind of illustrations will it contain? Photos? Line drawings? I used to produce camera ready back and white text but left a black box where a photograph was due to go. My printers used original photographs, scanned and resized them and inserted them into the document ready for the printing press. Consider the extra cost of adding colour. Anthing black uses a single printing plate. Add a single colour and you need a second plate. Add complex colour and you will need a black plate plus the three printers colours (cyan, magenta and yellow) which will also need processing to "colour separate" a photo. It all adds to the overall costs and the final price for the job. On the subject of photos, a professional will have expensive professional equipment which will do the job of scanning a photo at a much higher resolution than anything a home user is likely to have. Quack! GtD. |
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13 Mar 06 - 06:01 AM (#1691839) Subject: RE: Tech: Publishing Software From: Geoff the Duck And - remember each page of the final booklet not only has a reverse side, but it also joins to a page with a reverse side at the opposite end of the booklet e.g. in a 6 page booklet page 1 & 2 are the same sheet as P15 & 16. You might deliberately leave a blank sheet but be aware that you need to work in groups of 4 pages. Also find out from your printer how many pages will fit on one printing plate. You might find (for example)that 24 A5 pages will fit on one plate, but if you want 28 pages it will need a second plate (extra costs), but up to 48 pages would still be just two plates. You really do need to discuss with a prospective printer, because these sort of details can be important to the final price you will have to pay. Another important factor is how many copies you want to produce. Using a printer is expensive. If you want a simple booklet in small numbers it can be cheaper to use photocopying and staple them together by hand. If you need large numbers, there is a point where printing becomes more economical. A few years back we reckoned in the UK that the crossover point was around 500 copies. Less than 500 worked out cheaper to photocopy. Obviously, professional printers will produce a more consistent and neater product, but it depends what you actually need. A photocopied booklet can be made as and when you need extra copies, so you can use income from one batch to pay for the next batch. Quack! GtD. |