Gordon Woolf's Blog

Jack's an artist. That's what we need for the layout

It is a common question: The illustrator for my book is a talented artist, but should I ask him (or her) about doing the book layout?

It may also be suggested with magazine layout: he's a good artist, we should ask him to do our newsletter.

The real question should be to ask whether he has any experience and whether he wants to do the work. Then the publisher, or self-publisher, should ask himself or herself if they have time to cope with problems.

In a recent case the artist was being honest, and would have been prepared to put the time in (at his cost) to find out all the technical information he needed to know. However, there should be at least one person who has the professional knowledge of what makes a good book or magazine layout in the team.

The danger lies in the fact that publication layout and file preparation for printing is detailed, systematic work, and the skills for that are seldom those needed to be an artist and illustrator.

There are a few who manage to combine both skills but they are a minority and deserve every cent they can command. They will, for example, know that the uses of a book cover for thumbnails on the web or in catalogues and ads and possibly for posters as well as for the cover itself, puts severe restrictions on artistic talent.

More common are those designers and layout people who can take other people's illustrations and turn them into good looking and good working covers and pages and produce files which will print without problems. The person who creates good publication files and the illustrator and graphic artist may use much of the same software, but they tend to use it in vastly different ways.

The kind of questions one could ask someone who may be able to do this work could be whether he or she knows the common standards for relative margin widths, on the differences in specifications for different binding methods, and, for example if this includes, as is most likely, an all color cover, the maximum ink levels according to the printing process and paper stock.

He or she may not know the detailed answers but should know what you are talking about (even if you do not). Then (especially if there is time to go elsewhere if necessary), by all means give him or her a go.

Adobe v Apple: It's happened before

On the AppleInsider blog, Daniel Eran Dilger gives the background to the current Flash war with the comment "This all happened before".

His story and timeline of PostScript, the Laserwriter, TrueType, Aldus PageMaker, Macromedia's Freehand is almost all as I recall it and heard at the time from mainly Adobe insiders. The only statement I see which is a bit questionable is his assertion that Adobe did not realise when buying Aldus that the rights to Freehand did not come with the sale since they still belonged to the originators. Not until they bought Macromedia 10 years later did Freehand enter Adobe's fold.

However, if you think that lack of foresight (or what is now called "due dilligence" is impossible I can quote a tale from Australian media history. Our main TV weekly program guide which once sold a million copies a week was part of a publishing company sold off by News Ltd (which many years previously had been in the free-to-air TV business here) and ultimately sold to one of our major TV channels. After the final sale, the other leading TV company "revealed" that they owned 50% of the title. Within a week the magazine was being published by that company's publishing arm, from another city, with an entirely new staff.

Quite a blow for the other TV channel -- but I worked for that magazine several years earlier and as a fairly junior player I knew that the magazine was only half owned by the company publishing it. So I question how the money/management people did not know that essential fact when talking of multi-million deals. Could Adobe have not known about Freehand in 1994? Maybe.

It does not seem long ago that there were continuing email list discussions on the relative merits of true PostScript and the clones built in to printers. It dawned on most of us very slowly that the future lay in postscript interpreters resident on the computer, so slowly for me that the PostScript 2 laser printer I paid $5000 for (and $500 for each cartridge) we were unable to give away. It recently ended at the tip despite still being in working order.

The column is at:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/14/adobe_apple_war_on_flash_reminiscent_of_postscript_struggle.html&page=1

Skating on the Photoshop sliders

I noticed that the occasional mono pages which one of our local newspapers runs had pictures which were very muddy. It's a strong possibility that they are preparing all their pages in colour and just accepting that some of them may be run in black and white but a little time really should be taken to adjust for the lack of colour before it becomes almost a forgotten art.

It's a couple of years since a DTP-er I know was having trouble coping with instructions from a printer that detailed their pic specs as no less than 5% highlight dot, 80% max shadow, and midtones of 35 to 40%. The printer then added that this particular press might want the midtones down by another 10 or 15%.

That seems like a lot of old newspaper presses I know. Though, on second thoughts, they'd be hard pressed to hold a 5% highlight dot. My instructions on one paper were to drag both sliders in Photoshop in significantly, then drag the gamma slider across most of the way: no point in talking numbers, this was like engraving with a chainsaw -- provided you could hardly see anything on screen, there was a chance the final result would be fine.

The really amazing thing is that the final results were quite good.

This is the skill in working without color, and it is a good idea to ask a printer to show you what the original looks like for any black-and-white photos that look good (and maybe to give you the file) so you can see what you have to produce. Once you know what an original should look like on your screen, it is less necessary to work by the numbers. And some of those movements in the sliders within Photoshop can be far more than you would try without seeing an example.

The same principles apply to photocopying. Color is more forgiving than mono, but it is still worth learning some of the old skills. They can produce better color pics too.

And why do some pages have to run in black and white? That is because it does not matter to a large web press whether it is printing one color or many. It is the total number of plates which matter. A press can have the paper run from the reel (web) in many different ways so if fewer color plates are needed then more pages can be printed in the one run. So, some late ads can be accomodated without a second run and collating the two sections if some of the existing pages can be printed in one color instead of four.

'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.

Do-it-yourself publishing

"I've just got a price for laying out my new magazine/book/other printed project and it is a lot of money. Should I buy InDesign or QuarkXPress to do my own layout?"

That's the kind of email I get directly or see on email lists and forums just about every week. I'm an enthusiastic user of InDesign but the last thing I'm going to do is tell such a potential publisher is to rush off to the Adobe web site and buy it.

The first thing I'll ask is: "Have you costed in the time and training (either personal or by means of reading and practising)?"

I'm all for such a person learning to use InDesign if he or she will take the time to learn to use it and, in the case of a book, will use it for many other tasks in future.

After many years of using Ventura, then PageMaker, I did not do a book in InDesign until I had worked on a number of smaller jobs to make sure that I could work efficiently in the program. It is a very powerful program, but that makes it very easy to do a bad job.

There is also the likely situation that a newcomer will get quoted a lot more for a layout job by a designer than an experienced publisher would be charged for the same work. The book layout jobs I take outside of my own books, I do only for experienced publishers and know that, most times, I will only have to do the job once, so can quote lower prices. As an extreme example, when I did tabloid newspaper layouts I quoted $20 a page for work from newspaper publishers -- and $100 a page for anyone else. Subsequently I just stopped doing the $100 a page jobs as they were not profitable, whereas the $20 a page was.

Yes, the would-be publisher should by all means buy InDesign but should also realize that this involves learning yet another skill. Do you have the time for that? In general the answer has to be "no" unless you can find a skilled person who is prepared to charge you on a basis that they are also teaching you to do the job. That designer will expect and deserve a high fee -- but it may be the cheapest long term solution for the publisher.

Rich blacks

I was asked this question a while ago "concerning black color in CMYK printing". The questioner said: "I know that black process color doesn't give you 'real' black from the print, and you have to mix it with others to get darkest possible black. Can you tell me which combination gives the darkest possible black color (extra black) without any 'light' points?"

There's no easy answer to that...

The black you get via CMYK (100%K) is as black as you'll get from just using black ink in any other way (though genuine process black ink is somewhat more transparent than the more normal spot black), but it is true that you get a richer looking black from mixing in a little of the other colours.

The problem comes with small text -- if you have 6 or 8pt text printed in more than one of the CMYK colours and the registration isn't perfect, you'll get a blurred effect that will look far worse than any improvement you'll get from the richer colour.

The compromise for many is to use a small proportion of yellow (say 10%) which won't show up badly if you get a slight yellow edge to the text and to use a small percentage of the background colour.

Another way is to create a "rich black" with a small proportion of say Y and M and apply this only to larger text sizes. The most common combination seems to be 100% K with 20% Magenta to give a warmer black, and maybe 20% Y. Using Cyan instead of Magenta gives a cooler black.

It's also possible to use higher proportions of the other colours, but then you come up against the problem of the total amount of ink you are putting on the paper -- and this will depend on the paper and the press. It can be as low as around 250% for uncoated papers (taking 100% as the equivalent to printing one colour solid). Overprinted black on solid colour need to be watched especially for this danger.

So, it comes again, as with so many such problems, to needing the advice of an experienced press operator, who will have a good idea from experience of what works in specific circumstances.

Reading a print dialog

Can I print a selection of pages? That question came up recently in a discussion and I realised it is not always obvious.

Put simply, a good print dialog which shows a entry longish box named Pages, will usually let you enter non-continguous ranges. If you see two little boxes, labelled From and To, then you are stuck with one range.

In the first case you’ll be able to enter something like":

1-6,8-10,15-

That would mean pages 1 to 8, skip 7, then print 8 to 10, skip pages 11 to 14 and then print from 15 to the end.

There may also be a checkbox to select whether to print blank pages, but be wary that what you think of as blank may not look that way to the computer if there are headers or footers, or even just carriage returns.

Printer options are generally in the driver rather than being a selection from the printer itself, so they may be different between alternate drivers for the same printer -- there are major differences for example between the fit-to-page abilities of my Samsung laser under Windows XP and Windows 7. (It needs more clicks to make a web page fit to a printed page under the newer OS).

Another possibility is to make a PDF of the file since some PDF software, including Acrobat, give an option to  include blank pages, and you can also print by selecting ranges.

But does it look OK in print?

Have you noticed an increasing use of yellow and cyan for headlines and text in otherwise well designed magazines. I wonder if this unreadable print is a result of on-screen proofing where light colors do tend to show up more clearly than when printed. When this problem occurs in multiple issues I wonder whether graphic designers ever look at the finished product. Maybe the on-screen version is regarded as the final version and no longer is there the thrill of having someone pick up a first batch from the printer and throw a copy on to ever desk at the publisher's. With everything now seen on screen in what we are told is what it will look like in print, have we collectively lost the excitement of seeing "the real thing" -- and why? The problems of light type and the loss of readership and understanding it causes are dealt with in Type and Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes, the book by Colin Wheildon.