Researchers make substantial use of books and journals in their everyday work. However few people understand how these 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 will help the reader to understand document production, to appreciate the roles and skills necessary, and to realize the vast number of details and parameters involved in producing high-quality documents.
¶2.1.1 How do books get produced?
An interesting review of how books are produced is provided in One Book/Five Ways [One Book/Five Ways]. Five university presses participated in a comparative publishing experiment in which each press prepared the same book for publication. The scholarly presses that participated were 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, design and production, sales and promotion. Each of these presses 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, style guidelines from each of the presses are included. These guidelines establish the house style of the publisher and govern editorial, graphic design, illustration, composition and typesetting decisions. Perhaps the most well-known style guideline for scholarly documents is the University of Chicago Manual of Style, which was referenced by several presses in this experiment although most have their own refinements and special instructions.
An important aspect of the book production process is the parallelism achieved. When a manuscript arrives at the press for consideration, it is quickly copied and sent out for two or more independent reviews. Once the decision to publish is made and the completed manuscript arrives, it is again copied and a copy sent to the production editor who establishes the docket to track all the various stages of the publication, to the copy editor for editorial revisions, and to the graphic designer to design the book and handle the illustrations. Figure 2-1 shows this parallel process in a simplified and hypothetical publication process.
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ThesisFigure2-1.press
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Figure 2-1. Parallelism in a simplification of the traditional graphic arts process 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 along with the design of the document are typeset by the composition staff. 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, then that illustration is undertaken while the insides of the book are prepared. The table of contents and Library of Congress submission are prepared as soon as the book enters production to ensure that the imprint page and the front matter of the book can be 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 the pages have been assembled. Typically the index entries are compiled in parallel with the book composition. When the page numbers are assigned on the reproduction pages (or page repros) then the index manuscript is completed in parallel with the final proofreading of the book pages.
Even the use of electronic composition tools, preparation of the back matter is on the critical path and may end up with inconsistent page numbering. Such problems appear in the appendices of Introduction to Computer Graphics [Newman & Sproull] where the reference citations refer to a preliminary draft version since the authors forgot to revise the references in the appendices.
An important question to ask about the traditional graphic arts process is `What are the difficult parts and how are they handled?' Typically the difficult parts involve tables, mathematical or chemical notation, and illustrations.
There were only a small number of tables in the
One Book/Five Ways experiment but they were 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, Methods of Book Design, p 160]
The Chicago Manual of Style guides authors about the do's and don'ts of preparing tables in manuscripts. In particular, authors are to prepare tables on separate pages since they will be composed separately. There are some cautions also. For instance, Chicago no longer prefers vertical rules in tables because
hot metal Monotype composition, that could prepare a
vertical rule easily, is no longer economic and with phototypesetters 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, 13th Edition, 1982, p 325-6]
Although there were no mathematics in this experiment, math notation is treated very specially by publishers. Kernighan and Cherry note this difficulty in their paper on typesetting mathematics
[Kernighan & Cherry]:
"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." [The Chicago Manual of Style, 12th edition, 1969, p 295]
Some publishers specialize in mathematical and scientific documents and have both skilled copy editors on their staffs and special suppliers to handle the difficult mathematical material. In my experience, I have encountered North American publishers that send mathematics copy to the Far East where hot metal composition and cheap labour rates prevail.
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 since there were no convenient local suppliers. Another publisher in contrast planned photographs for each chapter opening as well as for the illustrations. Generally, illustrations are prepared while the book is being copy edited and are manually assembled onto the completed pages.
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, this iterative design process generally means that the publisher's guidelines have never been complete, to the frustration of those attempting to become a supplier with new technology.
An area of great concern to the publisher is administration of the production process. Publishers must 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 costs 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 the frequent publication deadlines for each issue.
These process control functions are the most important contributions of publishers. Some publishing companies are nothing much more than the production editors (except perhaps for marketing), subcontracting most of the skilled jobs such as copy editing, design, illustration, composition, printing, and so on. In the electronic publishing or self-publishing process these subcontracted jobs are conducted by the manuscript author and are the jobs that electronic document production tools will have to successfully complete.
¶2.1.2 Roles involved in producing a book
As I have outlined, the document production process is complex. To help understand the process better, this section examines the individual roles of the people involved in producing a published document. Anthropomorphism, or the application of human behaviour to some problem, has proven beneficial in trying to understand complex parallel processes that are modelled by computer programs [Dyment] [Booth & Gentleman]. The author of this thesis used anthropomorphism to design the multiple processes of a complex interactive paint program [Beach]. Through cataloguing the roles involved in document production, the structure of the problem becomes apparent and targets of opportunity reveal themselves in the context of electronic or automated document production environments.
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ThesisFigure2-2.press
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Figure 2-2. 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 corresponding point in time. Delays or inactivity are not shown but may exist at many places in the process.
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An important thing to remember while reading this categorization of roles is that they describe activities and not people. Sometimes people will fulfill several roles at once, such as an author that types and composes the manuscript, or a graphic designer that 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 one realizes the scope necessary to accomplish all aspects of that specialist's job. We need to concentrate on each role separately in order to understand the process.
· 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 [Seybold report], may be used by an author to improve the quality of the writing.
A draft manuscript is submitted by an author to an acquisitions editor or journal editor for consideration. With a favourable publishing decision, the author completes the manuscript, adds the 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 have 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 will also have to check the composition process by first looking at the galleys and later proofs of the assembled pages.
· Typist
The typist prepares the draft manuscript for the author using a typewriter, word processor or text editor program.
· 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.
· 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 the 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 their subject area, such as mathematics or computer programming. In some cases, the reviews may be transmitted electronically, especially when journal editors correspond via electronic mail networks.
· Production Editor
The production editor controls the document production process that turns a complete manuscript into its published form. Initially the production editor deals with the author to ensure that the manuscript is complete, that all the necessary illustrations are available, that all the sections of the manuscript are included, and that any special permissions to reproduce items are sought. The completed manuscript is copied and 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, either a paper one on the job docket or a computer one.
· Graphic Designer
The graphic designer provides the book design and layout guidelines. This design can only be effectively done when the entire manuscript is available, although some designs are attempted with incomplete information and later revised during publication. These design guidelines are written on a specification sheet or in a style sheet to be sent to the compositor with the copy edited manuscript.
Graphic designers may handle difficult typographic situations not covered in the general scheme, such as designing the layout for tables, and specifying typography for nested lists of material or for foreign language extracts.
Artwork for the illustrations may or may not be the additional responsibility of a graphic designer, depending on their talent or interest. Jacket or cover designs may also be the graphic designer's responsibility.
· Copy Editor
The copy editor ensures that the manuscript meets the publishers house style for language usage, grammar, spelling, citations, references, illustration captions, table arrangements, headings, lists of items, foreign language, et cetera, ad nauseum. The copy editor essentially deals with all the troublesome details that would annoy the reader if they were not treated consistently. For example, the copy editor checks all the cross references to other chapter or section numbers for completeness, and checks that all the captions, footnotes, citations are numbered sequentially. Any missing information or references and any questionable corrections are sent to the author for action.
Obviously electronic editing tools greatly assist the copy editor to accomplish these consistency checks. Multiple windows on a manuscript are helpful in checking cross references; pattern-matching search operations permit quick global checks; style and diction analysis tools mentioned earlier may be of assistance to check the grammar, spelling and language usage criteria of the publisher.
The copy editor also marks the manuscript for composition by identifying the logical parts of the document, such as the chapter openings, the various levels of section headings, the types of lists of items, the captions for tables and illustrations, etc. The treatment of the these logical parts is the responsibility of the graphic designer who specifies the typography for each of these parts to the compositor or typesetting program.
· 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 sometimes publications will not have an index to reduce the delay.
Electronic aids for indexing have not proven to be a panacea. Winograd and Paxton report the most interesting indexing tools that I have found [Winograd & Paxton] and yet they still required hand editing and fine tuning. The difficulty of 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. My experience in producing the indices for the Computing texts [WATFIV-S, PASCAL] proved the value of an iterative approach. Index terms were high-lighted in the draft manuscript, entered into the manuscript files, and collected automatically by the formatting program. The collected entries were sorted with a keyword-in-context package, and from the expanded list the indexers prepared cross references and new index phrases. Sorting index entries is straightforward, assuming the availability of a dictionary-order sorting package and the ability to handle multiple levels of major and minor index phrases. Assigning page numbers at the last composition pass is reasonable although this requires that all the index entries are entered into the manuscript file, a tedious job not tolerable under tight time constraints..
· Illustrator, Draftsman, Graphic Artist
The illustrations are prepared from initial artwork provided by the author. The range of illustrations spans fine art 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 the correct intentions. [Scientific American selects illustrators by an iterative process; difficulty getting consistent and accurate illustrations for the Computing book lead to the graphical style research]
The graphic designer may produce the illustration artwork directly or may establish the guidelines for artwork 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 or or by sharpening the contrast in the image. Careful coordination of dimensions and text size on the original is necessary to ensure that the reduced artwork suits the surrounding typography when assembled on the page.
· Keyboarder, Coder, Inputter
The composition of a document is accomplished in two stages: entering the marked-up manuscript into a typesettable file, and then producing the type on a typesetting device. The manuscript entry job may be further subdivided into several phases: designing format codes, assigning codes to the copy editor's marks, and inputting the manuscript codes and text. All of these jobs may be accomplished by the same person or may be delegated to people with appropriate skills.
The typesettable files may be entered directly on some less expensive and slow typesetting devices, or kept on some storage medium, perhaps paper tape, floppy diskettes, rigid disks or magnetic tape, for more expensive and high-speed typesetters. Corrections to the typeset galleys are most often made by typesetting corrected pieces of the manuscript. In the case of large documents, the management of the corrections is a concern and poses difficulties for subsequent uses of the document, but the expense and delay of retypesetting the large document is often prohibitive.
· Compositor, Typesetter
The format codes for a document are created by a skilled compositor from the graphic designer's guidelines and the copy editor's marked-up manuscript. 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, to begin an indented list of items, and for a line of a table. The 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.
· 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: the typeset text, the running heads and page numbers, the mechanical artwork for the illustrations, and all the photographs. Pages are assembled by cutting out the parts that will be placed on each individual page and pasting them onto page layout forms. These layout forms are typically printed with light blue lines that will not reproduce when photographic negatives for printing are taken.
In foundry type, the assembly process involved 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. In phototypesetting shops, the paste-up process requires a sharp knife and a waxing machine that makes the photopaper adhere to the layout forms.
The graphic designer may paste-up a document, especially if the manuscript requires frequent design decisions. In such cases it is really difficult to determine the rules and logic that were applied to accomplish some of these layouts.
· Process Camera Operator, Stripper
After the page assembly stage, the 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 film, whereas photographs are screened or halftoned to provide the tonal variations on the 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 master images is equivalent to the concept of rendering device-independent image masters like Interpress from Xerox [Interpress] and PostScript from Adobe Systems [PostScript].
· Printer
Printing processes vary depending on the number of copies or impressions required. Short-run printing, say up to 50 copies, can be printed cost-effectively with a Xerox copier from a paper original. Medium-run printing, say from 50 to 1,000 copies, can be printed with an offset duplicator using an inexpensive paper-based printing plate. Long-run printing, say 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 colour, then there will be must be separate impressions made for each printing ink colour. These colour separations may be prepared by an outside supplier working from a slide transparency of the coloured image, or the separations may be made by the process camera operator from colour-keyed parts of the original document.
· 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 together 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 will be designed and printed in time for binding.