Expert: Cathy Clamp - 1/30/2008

Question
QUESTION: What is the best and easiest typesetting software to learn to set up a book for BookStore Standards...Thanks..  Will Microsoft Publisher or Adobe In Design be acceptable?

ANSWER: Hi, Angie!

I asked a publisher friend of mine this question. Here's his answer:

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If the goal is to become a publisher, including cover art, etc, you have to give serious consideration to the Macintosh platform which still stands heads and shoulders above Windows when it comes to publishing, including print metrics, anti-aliasing, kerning, graphics, and color syncing and matching.

One of the reasons PDFs became important to print shops was that they would get funky output, and if the files were PDFs, they could point to them and say, "See, that's what you gave us." If color management and font graphics are unimportant, than it makes less difference which platform (PC/Mac) to use. Vista remains an unknown, but If ePublishing for proprietary eReaders is the goal, look more carefully at PCs (or Intel Mac) which uses more common (and less expensive) technology.

Quark Xpress and Adobe InDesign are more or less equivalent in price and features. I'd give inDesign a slight edge in friendliness. (Adobe has virtually eliminated their PageMaker product which was a friendly product, if a bit buggy.)

Either Xpress or InDesign will set you back big dollars. There's a couple of competing products out there that may run a bit less. One that comes to mind is Ragtime (love that name), which has been around for ages, longer than InDeisgn, for example.

I would not use Microsoft Publisher which is kind of an industry joke. It grew out of a low resolution kids' product for constructing greeting cards and while it vaguely resembled PageMaker, its metrics were sloppy and crude. Also, it's unlike Quark Xpress and InDesign which are built around Postscript technology which is built into professional printing RIPs (and incidentally is built into Macs).

A lot depends upon your publishing targets, the quality you're aming for, your local printer or service bureau, and whether you're willing to oursource parts of the process.

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Hope that helps! :)

Cathy

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hi Cathy....just wondering when you said......"Also, it's unlike Quark Xpress and InDesign which are built around Postscript technology which is built into professional printing RIPs (and incidentally is built into Macs)......WHAT is a postscript technology and printing RIP??  Also...someone told me they have seen books on MICROSOFT PUBLISHER in the Barnes and Noble and Borders Chain stores and if the skill level of the operator/typist of the Microsoft publihser was high, then that would be OK..and equal...the Adobe InDesign and Quark?  Is this true

Answer
Here's a great article to get you started on understanding how desktop publishing works:

http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/printing/a/postscriptprint.htm

RIP stands for "Raster Image Processing" It's the method that the software uses to turn the Postscript data into a visible image. Again, another good article:

http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/rip/a/rip.htm

Remember that when someone mentions the "skill level of the operator/typist" of a software, it generally means that you have knowledge BEYOND what a basic level book can provide. It's a matter of tweaking the program to do things it's not designed to do. Publisher isn't very operator friendly, nor intuitive. So it requires a lot more work to get it to do the same thing as the other do more easily. Hope that helps, and good luck!

Cathy