Quote:
Originally Posted by dauwhe
...I think the vast majority of trade books are now done in InDesign; it used to be almost all Quark. Some college textbooks are done in fancier systems like 3B2 or Arbortext, but trade publishers are used to total control over everything. They will complain about the justification of a single line, so it's much easier to deal with that kind of thing in a WYSIWYG environment.
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Yeah, but InDesign (which I use all day, every day) and Quark are layout programs used to get your prepress files 'just right' for print work there should be a before layout source that you dump into your design/layout software and that's where the ebook would/should start from. Using a well edited word processor file to make an ebook doesn't really take much. Heck I just scanned a book I wanted that I'm sure won't see a commercial ebook for a long time, if ever, and it took me about eight hours work to scan, proof and produce a nice ebook. There is really very little design that can be done (at least when compared to traditional typesetting) at least when talking about fiction books.
The problem is publishers need to understand that PDF isn't usable (well it is, but you know what I mean) as a source and that whatever was used to make the PDF or whatever was dumped into InDesign is what they need to provide. PDF was designed by Adobe to be a dead end. Yes, they, and others have provided ways to get text out of it, but it wasn't designed for that for the most part. Most publishers just don't understand what's what, or don't want to understand. A lot of them still aren't really into the idea of ebooks.