Gordon Woolf's Blog

'Large print' is not just type set larger

An interesting suggestion I saw on a publisher forum a while ago was to produce a large print edition and to just reduce the pages of this to make the standard edition. The logic was that some of the readers for which the book was intended were sufferers of diabetes, which often brings sight problems.

Unfortunately the internationally researched standards for large print books, are not just an enlarged form of normal typesetting. And there is a big difference in producing books for those who are substantially sight impaired, and books for those of us who may have a slight deterioration in sight within the normal ranges of variation with age.

A chapter in the current edition of Type & Layout (the book by Colin Wheildon republished by The Worsley Press) -- although this is a chapter in the additional material by Geoffrey Heard -- does describe how preparing a book for the non-fluent reader is different to preparing a book for a fluent reader who may have minor sight problems, or no problems at all.

Just one quick example: although Wheildon's research showed that for reasonably fluent readers, justified serif type is by far the most readable, that is not true for someone who is less fluent, either through education or sight.

The chapter also includes information on the alternative of "Clear Type", a standard developed by the Royal National Institute for the Blind, with standards which, while being acceptable to a wide range of those with site problems, is more acceptable to others. While tending towards sans faces it does accept fonts with a good serif definition such as Bookman.

I would therefore warn against producing a smaller version of a large type, or even "Clear Type" book as a normal edition.

If the text of a book is correctly tagged in its preparation it would be a very simple matter to run it through with alternative layout specifications. I'd estimate an hour or two in a program such as InDesign, maybe even less in an entirely tag based layout program such as TeX.

There will need to be an entire new round of research into legibility on ebook readers.

Oh no! Not the 'Under New Management' Sign

In my book Success in Store both I and my co-author separately berated anyone who'd even consider a sign stating Under New Management.

If the business was good then you do not want to make a point of saying that the old owner has gone; customers, even those who are not actually dissatisfied, may take it as an opportunity to just drop off, to try that other shop they've been thinking of going to.

If the business was bad, then if a sign with those words is all you can do to make it appear that things have changed, then you may appear to be doing the same old things in the same old way.

But this sign is a play on the theme. It's big, on a busy road where it stood out even to people like me who had not noticed the business as it was. But it makes a strong point and it is in a field where many such businesses in Australia were taken over by huge groups who seemed to have money to burn but then burned out. It can therefore be a good idea to promote the benefit that the "new" owners are in fact the old owners who knew what they were doing.

We hope it helps. 

What's the production schedule for a publication?

I was asked what a typical production schedule for a magazine would look like.

I doubt if there is actually such a thing as a "typical schedule". Most that I've come across start with a simple list working backwards from the print date to the date on which final ads and editorial have to be with page production.

Then both advertising and editorial section will calculate back from that to have separate schedules.

However this is something which should be considered carefully not only in the planning for a new publication but also at other times by every publication. And schedules all have to bear in mind that only a few final items can be prepared on that deadline.

In advertising it is normal to set a deadline a day or two ahead of the date required by the production department, and the following wording occurs in many sets of conditions (this is for a weekly published locally on a Friday):

Preferred deadline for the receipt of all advertising materials is Friday, seven days before publication. Materials and space reservations will be accepted, however, until 5 pm Monday, week of publication. When space has been reserved and paid for by Monday, camera-ready materials can be accepted until 4 pm Tuesday, week of publication. Electronically submitted ads for which space has been reserved must be received by 1 pm Tuesday. Cancellations and changes cannot be accepted after 5 pm Monday, week of publication. For advertisers wishing to approve a proof, the deadline is noon Wednesday, nine days before publication. Major holidays that are celebrated on weekdays generally cause the deadlines to fall one business day earlier.

You will find many such schedules in the online conditions of publications.

There are also likely to be earlier deadlines on small display ads and perhaps later ones on classifieds which are just run in automatically by system software.

In editorial, magazines will tend to work in production runs even though all the runs may be on the press at the same time. So there will be perhaps on a 64-page magazine deadlines each day for perhaps 16 pages. The deadline given for editorial submissions would normally be a week or more ahead of the earliest of those dates for regular contributors who can be relied on to meet deadlines, a week or two further ahead for contributors who are not yet trusted, and then another couple of weeks further ahead for anything which is being considered at an editorial conference or on which the editor has yet to make a decision.

All these dates will normally be indicated by marks or stickers on a wall planner -- I have come across publications using computer scheduling but it is too easy to ignore something that is not constantly in the face of the actual users.

A production run which is a physically separate run on the press, even if only a day earlier, will usually be regarded as a separate production process to be completed before the final section, and so will most likely have a deadline at least a week before the rest. It can almost be regarded internally as a separate publication.

It basically comes down to ensuring there is a steady flow of work for each person in the process, so not only does the person setting the schedule have to consider what amount of work is possible in the time, but also what those people will be doing at other times. That is why it is common for feature pages of daily newspapers to be scheduled for all work to be completed two to three days ahead of the news pages. News pages will also have a succession of deadlines -- and the only pages actually prepared on deadline for a daily newspaper are likely to be the front page and the main sports page.

Despite the common impression that publications are a frantic hive of activity on deadline, any publication which is like that other than when a disaster occurs just ahead of that deadline, has a production schedule which needs work. I've worked on magazines where final deadline day can be very quiet, a time for long lunches because those in charge of checking final proofs just need to know where everyone is in case there is a query. A newspaper may be very quiet after midnight with just a late copyeditor watching the wire service.

On the other hand, if unexpected news breaks just as the deadline approaches, then real life may resemble the newsrooms of the movies.