Richard J. Beach
University of Waterloo
Researchers make substantial use of books and journals in their everyday work. However, few people understand how those documents are produced. Only when they decide to write their own book or to edit a scholarly journal do they become involved in the mysterious world of the graphic arts. This survey is intended to help the reader to understand document production, to appreciate the many diverse roles and skills necessary, and to realize the vast number of details and decisions involved in producing high-quality documents.
1. How are books produced?
An interesting review of how books are produced is contained in the anthology One Book/Five Ways [AAUP, One Book/Five Ways]. This reports on a comparative publishing experiment in which five university presses prepared the same book for publication: the University of Chicago Press, the MIT Press, the University of North Carolina Press, the University of Texas Press, and the University of Toronto Press.
The procedures used in each press were remarkably common. Although the approaches varied somewhat, all involved the stages of acquisition, market and preliminary cost estimation, editorial revision, design, production, sales, and promotion. Each press documented their procedures, their forms, and the guidelines they applied to the various processes. One Book/Five Ways contains a rich collection of raw material for anyone interested in the publishing process.
In particular, the report includes the style guidelines from each of the presses. These guidelines establish the publisher's house style, and govern editorial, graphic design, illustration, composition, and typesetting decisions. Perhaps the most well-known style guideline for scholarly documents is The Chicago Manual of Style, which was referenced by several presses in this experiment, although most have their own refinements and special instructions.
An important feature of the traditional book production process is the parallelism achieved through several groups working on distinct aspects of a book. When a manuscript arrives at the press for consideration, it is quickly copied and sent out for two or more independent reviews to decide whether to publish the work. Once the decision to publish is made and the completed manuscript arrives from the author, copies are sent simultaneously to (1) the production editor, who establishes a job docket to track all of the subsequent stages of the publication, (2) the copy editor, who makes editorial revisions, and (3) the graphic designer, who designs the book and its illustrations. This parallelism is shown in Figure 1 for a simplified and hypothetical publication process.
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[Artwork node; type 'ArtworkInterpress on' to command tool]
Figure 1. TRADITIONAL GRAPHIC ARTS PROCESSES involve considerable parallelism in the procedures for publishing a manuscript. The author's manuscript is copied and sent to the production editor, the copy editor, and the design/illustration department. Edited pages are typeset by the composition staff who are guided by the design of the document. The typeset manuscript and the illustrations are then assembled into pages in preparation for printing.
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Other parts of the document publication process also involve parallelism. If the book is to have a jacket or cover illustration, that illustration is undertaken while the insides of the book are prepared. The table of contents and Library of Congress submission forms are prepared as soon as the book enters production to ensure that the imprint page and the front matter of the book are ready for printing.
The index is often on the critical path near the end of the document production cycle. Since index entries must have the correct page numbers, the index can not be fully completed until all of the pages have been assembled. Typically the index entries are compiled in parallel with the book composition. After the page numbers are assigned on the reproduction pages (or page repros) the index manuscript is completed in parallel with the final proofreading of the book pages.
Even with the use of electronic composition tools, preparation of back matter is on the critical path and inconsistent page numbering occasionally results. Such problems appear in the appendices of the second edition of Newman and Sproull's Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics [Newman&Sproull, Computer Graphics], in which the reference citations all refer to a preliminary draft version, because the authors forgot to make `one last revision pass' over the reference citations in the appendices. The second edition was typeset by the authors using facilities at Xerox PARC because they could complete revisions up to the last minute and control the accuracy of computer programs contained in the text. In a normal production process, there are more people checking things and hence less chance of oversights, such as what actually happened in the appendices.
An area of great concern to the publisher is administration of the production process. Publishers usually have several projects underway at the same time because of the delays involving revisions and approvals from the author of a single project. The production editor controls the document publication process for the publisher, determining time and cost estimates for the publication, selecting and contracting with suppliers, tracking the parallel stages of the composition process, and keeping records of deadlines and expenses. In a journal publishing situation, the problem is compounded by the dual pressures of multiple authors and frequent publication deadlines for each issue.
These process control functions are the most important contributions of publishers. Some publishing companies employ little more than production and marketing editors in house, subcontracting most of the skilled jobs such as copy editing, design, illustration, composition, printing. In the electronic publishing or self-publishing process, these subcontracted jobs are performed by the manuscript author and electronic document production tools will have to handle them successfully.
The traditional document production process in the graphic arts routinely accommodates difficult manuscripts. Typically tables, mathematical notation, illustrations, and page layout are aspects of document production that are considered difficult by traditional publishers. The following sections discuss how each one of these areas was handled in the comparative publishing experiment.
Tables
There were only a small number of tables in the
One Book/Five Ways experiment, but they were always treated separately from the main body of text. Many publishers rely on the skill of the compositor or typesetter to handle tables:
``A good composing room can translate almost any tabular copy in a reasonably clear and presentable example of tabular composition.'' [Williamson, Book Design, p 160]
The Chicago Manual of Style provides authors with the ``dos and don'ts'' for preparing tables in manuscripts. In particular, authors are expected to prepare tables on separate pages because the tables will be composed separately from the text. There are some cautions also. For instance, the University of Chicago Press no longer prefers vertical rules in tables because Monotype composition (using molten metal casting of individual letters), which could insert a
vertical rule easily, is no longer economical. With phototypesetter composition, vertical rules are difficult and expensive:
``In line with a nearly universal trend among scholarly and commercial publishers, the University of Chicago Press has given up vertical rules as a standard feature of tables in the books and journals that it publishes. The handwork necessitated by including vertical rules is costly no matter what mode of composition is used, and in the Press's view the expense of it can no longer be justified by the additional refinement it brings.'' [—, The Chicago Manual of Style, 1982, p 325-326]
Mathematics
Although there were no mathematics in this experiment, publishers treat mathematical notation very differently than textual material. Kernighan and Cherry note this difficulty in their paper on computer typesetting of mathematics
[Kernighan&Cherry, eqn] where they quote the following from
The Chicago Manual of Style:
``Mathematics is known in the trade as difficult, or penalty, copy because it is slower, more difficult and more expensive to set in type than any other kind of copy normally occurring in books and journals.'' [—, A Manual of Style, 1969, p 295]
Some publishers specialize in mathematical and scientific documents. They utilize both skilled copy editors and special suppliers to handle the difficult mathematical material. Other North American publishers send mathematics copy to the Far East, where hot metal composition provides the quality and cheap labor rates reduce the cost.
Illustrations
The treatment of illustrations varied widely in the publishing experiment described in One Book/Five Ways. In one instance, a publisher chose to have an artist prepare line drawings rather than include halftone photographs because there were no convenient local suppliers to create halftone screens for the photographs. In contrast, another publisher planned photographs for the opening page of each chapter as well as for most of the illustrations. Generally, illustrations are prepared separately while the book is being copy-edited, and are then manually assembled onto the completed pages.
Page Layout
Examining the book design and page layout used by most publishers reveals mainly the results rather than the design process itself. Page dummies and sample pages are the usual products of the design process. Page dummies are sketches of the page layouts prepared by the graphic designer for approval. Sample pages are pages typeset and assembled by the composition supplier. Both techniques may require several iterations between designer, supplier, and publisher to make certain that the publisher is satisfied and that all the style guidelines are followed. Unfortunately, such an iterative design process generally means that the publisher's guidelines have never been completely specified, frustrating those attempting to become a supplier with new technology.
2. Roles involved in producing a book
The document production process is complex. To help understand the process better, this section examines the individual roles of people involved in producing a published document. Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human behavior to some problem, has proven beneficial in making complex parallel processes more easily understood [Dyment, Corkscrew] [Booth&Gentleman, Anthropomorphism]. An interactive paint program [Beach, Paint] was implemented using multiple processes, where anthropomorphism served to clarify and simplify the relationships of the parallel processes. Through cataloguing the roles involved in document production, the structure of the problem becomes apparent as a set of integrated processes.
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[Artwork node; type 'ArtworkInterpress on' to command tool]
Figure 2. A HYPOTHETICAL PUBLISHING PROCESS indicating the roles and their interactions at various stages. The horizontal axis represents elapsed time and the thin vertical lines join activities that begin or end at the same time. Delays or inactivity are not shown, but may exist at many places in the process.
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(Aside: An example of the lack of integration in electronic tools occurred when preparing Figure 2. There are 15 text labels and the first version of the illustration contained two spelling mistakes. Because the illustration was prepared with a separate illustration tool and was not integrated with the document, the spelling tool used on the text of this chapter was unable to find the mistakes in the illustration.)
An important thing to remember while reading this categorization of roles is that the descriptions relate to activities and not people. Sometimes people may fill several roles at once, such as an author who types and composes the manuscript, or a graphic designer who does the layout, illustration, and paste-up. The use of document composition tools in universities and research labs has tended to encourage (or force) authors to take on multiple roles. From this experience, people may falsely conclude that each job looks easier than it is, especially when they are not aware of what they are doing wrong. Concentrating on each role separately helps us to understand the process and to realize the skills necessary to accomplish all aspects of that specialist's job.
f Author of the manuscript
The author creates the original manuscript. Generally, the manuscript is textual material, although for some subject areas there will be vast quantities of mathematical notation, computer programs, tables, line drawings, or photographs. The author may produce several draft manuscripts with the assistance of a typist. Some authors now do their own typing with word processors or text editors. Sophisticated editorial tools, such as the diction and writing style analysis tools offered in the UNIX Writer's Workbench [Cherry, Writing Tools] [Macdonald, Writer's Workbench] and in other commercial editing systems [Alexander, Editor Aids], may be used by an author to improve the quality of the writing.
A draft manuscript is submitted by an author to an acquisition editor or journal editor for consideration. After a favorable publishing decision, the author completes the manuscript and adds front matter that may include a preface, an introduction, acknowledgements, etc. If the document is to be indexed or have other reference material, the author may need to prepare this material also. The completed manuscript is sent to the production editor, who begins the publication process. Some publishers will now accept manuscript submission in electronic form, such as word processor diskettes or magnetic tape.
The author may be involved in reviewing decisions made by the publisher. The copy editor will mark the manuscript with suggested changes and questions to be dealt with by the author. The graphic designer or illustrator may send drafts of the book design and illustration artwork for review and approval. There may also be an indexer involved, who may send the preliminary index entries to the author for review. The author must also check the composition process by first looking at the galleys and later at proofs of the assembled pages.
f Typist
The typist prepares the draft manuscript for the author using a typewriter, word processor, or text editor program. Typewriter composition involves only simple typography, typically with only a small number of type styles. Technical typing with many mathematical symbols is much more difficult and time consuming; some typists resort to hand printing symbols that are unavailable on the typewriter. The layout of typewritten material is free form and requirements are quite relaxed. Tables are easily laid out with fixed-width characters on a typewriter.
The human typist frequently acts as a built-in spelling checker and copy-editing service while transcribing the manuscript.
There are several drafts prepared during the creation of a manuscript. If each draft is retyped to incorporate changes, there is a strong tendency to reduce the number of drafts because of the effort required. Often, the completed manuscript contains partial page inserts pasted or stapled together.
f Acquisition Editor or Journal Editor
The acquisitions editor solicits and reviews new manuscripts from authors. Opinions of reviewers are sought to determine if the manuscript should be published. The publishing decision is made by a publication board or a committee of journal editors and is concluded by the signing of a publication contract or agreement between the publisher and the author.
f Reviewer or Referee
A manuscript reviewer may be asked by a publisher to give one of several opinions. Book publishers refer to these people as reviewers, and journal editors refer to them as referees. Reviews made early in the process seek to establish the marketability of a manuscript or the appropriateness of a journal article. Later, more comprehensive reviews seek to assess the subject coverage, research contributions, and technical accuracy of the manuscript. Reviewers are generally most concerned with document content, although in some special cases they may also consider the format or style of a manuscript.
Some reviewers of technical material may use their own typesetting capabilities to capture their comments in the complex notation of the subject area, such as mathematics or computer programming. In some cases, such as computer science journals, the reviews may even be transmitted electronically via electronic mail networks.
f Production Editor
The production editor controls the document production process. Initially the production editor deals with the author to ensure that the manuscript has all necessary illustrations, that all the sections of the manuscript are finished, and that permission is obtained to reproduce items from other sources. Copies of the completed manuscript are sent in parallel to the copy editor for editorial revisions and to the graphic designer for book design and illustration. Production editors contact and select appropriate suppliers for graphic arts services when those services are not available within the publisher.
To help manage and track the various stages of several publications going on simultaneously, the production editor maintains a production database recording the expected services, the date and time each service began and finished, the estimated and actual costs incurred, and the current status of ongoing services. This database exists either on paper as the job docket (a large envelope that contains all the partially completed results) or in a computer file.
f Graphic Designer
The graphic designer provides the book design and layout guidelines. This design can only be done effectively when the entire manuscript is available, although some designs are attempted with incomplete information and later revised during publication. The design guidelines are written in a specification sheet or in a style sheet to be sent to the compositor with the copy-edited manuscript (see the example in the next section).
As difficult typographic situations arise, graphic designers may design special guidelines for those not covered in the general scheme, such as designing the layout for tables, and specifying the typography for nested lists of material or for foreign language extracts.
Artwork for the illustrations may or may not be the responsibility of a graphic designer, depending on the designer's agreement, talents, or interests. Jacket or cover designs may also be the graphic designer's responsibility.
f Copy Editor
The copy editor ensures that the manuscript meets the publisher's house style for language usage, grammar, spelling, citations, references, illustration captions, table arrangements, headings, lists of items, foreign language phrases, etc. The copy editor deals with all the irksome details that would annoy the reader if they were not treated consistently. For example, the copy editor checks cross references from one section to another for completeness and verifies that captions, footnotes, and citations are numbered sequentially. Missing information or references and questionable corrections are sent to the author for action.
Obviously electronic editing tools greatly assist the copy editor to accomplish these consistency checks. Displaying both the cross reference and its referent through multiple views (or windows) of a manuscript help to check cross references; pattern-matching search operations permit quick global checks; style and diction analysis tools may be of assistance in checking the grammar, spelling and language usage.
The copy editor marks the manuscript for the compositor by identifying the logical parts of the document, such as chapter openings, various levels of section headings, types of lists of items, and captions for tables and illustrations. Selecting the typographic treatment of those logical parts is the responsibility of the graphic designer, who specifies to the compositor the typography for each part in the style guidelines.
f Indexer
The indexer prepares the index entries for a manuscript, assigns page or reference numbers to each entry, sorts them, and creates an index manuscript. The indexing job may or may not be done by the author, although the author usually must approve the index manuscript. The indexer works with the manuscript in two stages: the copy-edited manuscript prior to composition to determine the index entries, and the page proofs to assign the correct page numbers to the sorted index entries. The requirement for correct page numbers places the index on the critical path for publication and some publications omit the index to reduce the delay.
Electronic aids for indexing have not proven to be a panacea. Winograd and Paxton created a general set of indexing tools [Winograd&Paxton, TEX Indexing], yet the index still required hand editing and fine tuning. The difficulty in preparing an index is the proper selection and cross referencing of index entry terms or phrases. Skilled indexers still produce better indices than most computer-generated ones because they index on meaning, not on a precise phrase found in the manuscript.
f Illustrator, Draftsman, Graphic Artist
The illustrations for a publication are prepared from initial artwork provided by the author. The range of illustrations found in technical documents spans fine hand-drawn illustrations produced by a graphic artist, engineering drawings prepared by a draftsman, and photographs supplied by the author or a photographic service. Often illustrations are produced by tracing the author's sketches, which results in revision cycles as the author more clearly indicates his intentions.
The graphic designer may produce illustration artwork personally or may establish artwork guidelines for original size, reduction factors, line weight, typography, shading textures, materials, and so on. Reducing the original artwork improves the quality of the line drawings by making the line weights appear more consistent (small variations are less noticeable) and by sharpening the contrast in the image. Careful coordination of dimensions and text size on the original artwork is necessary to ensure that the reduced artwork suits the surrounding typography when assembled on the page.
f Keyboarder, Coder, or Inputter
The composition of a document is accomplished in two stages: entering the marked-up manuscript into a typesettable file, and then outputting the file on a typesetting device. Typically there is one format code for each logical part of the document marked by the copy editor. For example, there might be a code for the chapter opening, for each level of section heading, for beginning an indented list of items, and for a line of a table. The job of entering the marked-up manuscript may be further subdivided into several phases: assigning format codes to the copy editor's marks, designing the typesetter codes for each format, and inputting the manuscript codes and text. The style sheet provided by the graphic designer determines the appearance of marked up parts of the manuscript and hence the typesetter codes required.
The typesettable files may either be entered directly, on less expensive slow typesetting devices, or kept on some storage medium (perhaps paper tape, floppy diskettes, rigid disks or magnetic tape) for more expensive high-speed typesetters. Corrections to the typeset galley proofs are most often made by typesetting corrected pieces of the manuscript, rather than correcting the files and retypesetting the entire galley. In the case of large documents, management of the corrections is a concern and poses difficulties for subsequent uses of the document.
f Compositor, Typesetter
The compositor produces the actual typeset output. This person may also do the keyboarding, but a compositor must have the skill to enter specific typographic codes for unusual or difficult typesetting jobs, such as for mathematics, tables, illustration labels, copy fit text that must fit certain dimensions, and so on. The compositor runs the typesettable file through the typesetting device and produces the typeset galleys or pages.
f Paste-up Artist
Most documents are typeset in galley form and later cut and pasted into page assemblies. The paste-up artist collects all the pieces of the manuscript in their final form: typeset text, running heads with page numbers, mechanical artwork for the illustrations, and photographs. Pages are assembled by cutting apart the galleys into pieces that will fit on each individual page and pasting the pieces onto page layout forms. These layout forms are typically printed with light blue lines that will not reproduce on photographic negatives for printing. The paste-up process requires a sharp knife and a waxing machine, which coats the back of photopaper lightly with wax that helps the paper adhere to the layout forms when the two are pressed together. The wax adhesive is pliable so that the pieces can be safely separated if the layout needs to change.
Paste-up only applies to photocomposition systems that produce paper or film original type. With metal foundry type, the assembly process involves moving metal type slugs into place and performing craft operations, like surrounding type slugs with furniture to provide the spacing for page layout, or kerning individual letter slugs by cutting off the corners to make them fit together better. Some legal organizations have required metal type for legal documents to avoid potential errors in electronic composition systems using phototypesetters [Leith, Metal type]; they wanted to see and verify the final type.
The graphic designer may paste-up a document, especially if the manuscript requires frequent design decisions. In such cases it is quite difficult afterward to determine the rules and logic that were applied to accomplish some of the creative layouts.
f Process Camera Operator, Stripper
After the page assembly stage, completed pages are ready for printing. Depending on the printing process, it may be necessary to use a large-format graphic arts process camera to prepare photographic negatives of each page. The negatives are in turn used to expose printing plates. Text and line art illustrations are photographed directly on very high contrast negative film, whereas photographs are screened or halftoned to provide the tonal variations on high contrast film. If the printer is capable of printing several pages in one pass, then the stripper must prepare an imposition of several pages into one printing signature.
The graphic arts process of producing printing plates from assembled pages (master images) has been imitated by the concept of rendering device-independent image masters through page description languages like Interpress from Xerox [—, Interpress] and PostScript from Adobe Systems [—,PostScript].
f Printer
The printing process selected by the publisher depends on the number of copies or impressions required. Short-run printing (up to 50 copies) can be printed cost-effectively with a photocopier from a paper original. Medium-run printing (from 50 to 1,000 copies) can be printed with an offset duplicator using an inexpensive paper-based printing plate. Long-run printing (from 1,000 to 10,000 copies) are generally printed with high-speed offset printing presses in signatures containing several pages and using metal printing plates.
If the document requires color, then there must be separate impressions made for each printing ink color. Each impression requires a separate master image, one for each color of ink. To print images with a full range of colors, separations may be prepared by an outside supplier working from a slide transparency of the colored image. For a small number of flat colors (typically black plus one or two colors) the separations may be made by the process camera operator from color-keyed parts of the original document.
f Binder
The printed pages must be collated and bound together to form a completed document. The bindery specializes in taking the bulk pages, possibly in signature form, folding them, collating them in the correct sequence, sewing or otherwise fastening the pages together, and trimming the pages to finished size. The cover, whether a cloth-covered hard-cardboard case or a strong paper back, is attached around the document. Any printing on the cover or jacket must be designed and printed in time for binding. The result is a completed publication ready for distribution.
3. References
[—, A Manual of Style, 1969] —. A Manual of Style. The University of Chicago Press, 12th edition, 1969.
[—, Interpress] —. Interpress Electronic Printing Standard. Xerox System Integration Standard, XSIS 048404, April 1984.
[—, PostScript] —. PostScript Language Manual. Adobe Systems, First edition, revised, September 1984.
[—, The Chicago Manual of Style, 1982] —. The Chicago Manual of Style. The University of Chicago Press, 13th Edition, 1982.
[AAUP, One Book/Five Ways] Association of American University Presses. One Book/Five Ways. William Kaufmann, 1978.
[Alexander, Editor Aids] —. ``Computer Aids for Authors and Editors,'' The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems 13 10. February 13, 1984, 3-18.
[Beach, Paint] Richard J. Beach, John C. Beatty, Kellogg S. Booth, Eugene L. Fiume, and Darlene A. Plebon. ``The Message is the Medium: Multiprocess Structuring of an Interactive
Paint Program,'' Computer Graphics 16 3. July 1982, 277-287.
[Cherry, Writing Tools] Lorinda L. Cherry. ``Writing Tools,'' IEEE Transactions on Communications 1. January 1982, 100-105.
[Dyment, Corkscrew] Doug Dyment. ``A Corkscrew for the Software Bottleneck,'' Micros 1 2. October 1982, 21-24.
[Kernighan&Cherry, eqn] Brian W. Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry. ``A System for Typesetting Mathematics,'' Communications of the ACM 18 3. March 1975, 151-157.
[Leith, Metal type] Robert Leith. Private communication concerning typesetting customers insisting on metal type for legal documents to avoid the potential for errors in electronic compositions sytems using phototypesetters, 1981.
[Macdonald, Writer's Workbench] Nina H. Macdonald, Lawrence T. Frase, Patricia S. Gingrich, and Stacey A. Keenan. ``The Writer's Workbench: Computer Aids for Text Analysis,'' IEEE Transactions on Communications 1. January 1982, 105-110.
[Newman&Sproull, Computer Graphics] W.M. Newman and R.F. Sproull. Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics, Second edition. McGraw Hill, 1973.
[Williamson, Book Design] Hugh Williamson. Methods of Book Design. Oxford University Press, 1966.
[Winograd&Paxton, TEX Indexing] Terry Winograd and Bill Paxton. ``An Indexing Facility for TEX'', Tugboat (TEX users' group newsletter), 1 1, October 1980, Appendix A.