Quote:
Originally Posted by Ankh
I can understand the attachment to InDesign. It is doing its job well, and "everybody knows how to do it". It is impossible to eliminate it, really. For both PDF and plates.
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And there is no real reason to want to eliminate it. It does do its job well.
A friend is a DTP specialist doing typeset/markup for a major publisher. She was a Quark Xpress wizard, back when Quark owned the DTP market, and had developed work arounds for myriad Quark stupidities to let her do things as desired. Then everyone started shifting to Adobe InDesign. InDesign is a good product that doesn't
have all those stupidities to work around. Suddenly her hard won expertise was useless...
(She doesn't
really regret bidding adieu to Quark. InDesign
is better.
)
Quote:
However, ePub is new requirement for that process, and insisting on ePub production from InDesign is just one of the choices.
The second one is going the DocBook route. The extra step, conversion from Microsoft word to DocBook (XML, really) pays off, as one can early strip off all extra formatting in Word file (which happens at some point, anyway), and then proofreading process can more efficiently fix the structure of the publication (things like chapters, sections, etc.). By the time that one is finished with the conversion, result is very "tame" for importing into InDesign, and typesetting
The result is, also, very "tame" for ePub production, as conversion (with predefined template) from DocBook to ePub is yet another script. And not overly complex at that.
O'Reilly deals with publications that are way more complex than Baen books when it comes to typesetting. They are tech savvy, aren't they? And they did go with the DocBook.
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*sigh*
O'Reilly isn't merely tech savvy. They
are techs, publishing tech books
for techs. No surprise they'd eat thier own dog food, so to speak.
The rest of publishing is quite another matter. Half of it is still being dragged kicking and screaming into doing ebooks at all. The last thing most publishers will want is another layer in the workflow and a new technology to adopt and understand.
If ebooks can be produced largely automatically as part of what they already do - typeset and markup in InDesign - by simply saving as ePub as well as PDF, there's a
much lower hurdle in the path.
______
Dennis