Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
In current releases, the publisher gets a manuscript in MS Word format. That gets copy edited and proofread, then imported into Adobe InDesign for markup and typesetting. The output from InDesign is a PDF that goes to the printer, and is the input to the imagesetter than actually makes the plates the printer will print from.
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For those who doubt, Dennis' description of the process is pretty accurate. I say "pretty" because there is one step that is not mentioned but needs to be. After the manuscript is edited (presumably) by a professional editor, the edited copy is usually returned to the author to approve or disapprove the editor's changes (the changes are shown using Track Changes). Unfortunately, that sometimes -- and more often than you might think -- means that corrections made in editing are undone by the author who believes whatever he/she wrote originally is sacrosanct. I have had the "pleasure," on a few occasions over my 25 years of editing, of discovering that the print version of a book that I edited had been returned to its original (or to near-original) state by the author, replete with errors, because the author was incensed that the publisher had permitted me to do anything more than run spell check and the publisher was more interested in appeasing the author and getting the book out than in whether the book had a minimum number of errors.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
One issue for ebooks is that InDesign produces crappy ePub output. Decent ePub requires well formed XML as input, and while the tools are starting to appear to markup to XML, they aren't widely adopted in publishing yet. We'll see. From the viewpoint of the person doing the markup, whether the output is a PDF or XML should be irrelevant. They just need a tool with the features they need to do the job, in an interface that makes using the tool reasonable.
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Absolutely true. We have tried to use InDesign's export to ePub feature and its output ain't pretty. Considering that Adobe has adotoped and helped design the ePub standard and is pushing ADE, you would think that Adobe would solve this problem. Perhaps that will be the big inducement to upgrade to InDesign CS5. One thing, though, is true: version CS4 is a major improvement over CS3.