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What does it mean to be press ready?

What does it mean to be press ready?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 19:22 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876)
In reply to: The first? by wjhenney
Parent article: Scribus 1.0 released

Hello,

I am not deeply familiar with any of the Tex stuff but while it may be professional I am not sure that it is press ready. A quick look at Scribus sees that it handles concepts like spreads that are only important if you want to print off on a printing press. It also handles colour nicely by having native knowledge of CMYK colour spaces and ICC profiles. The fact that it can save files as PDF/X3 and that it uses it's own PostScript driver internally also speak well of it's ability to integrate well into prepress environments.

This is truly intended to be a competitor to Quark Xpress, Adobe InDesign, and the like. I would expect that most Tex output that becomes books in a store would go through a program like this at some point even if the author did not know it.

Justin Malcolm


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What does it mean to be press ready?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 20:17 UTC (Wed) by dr_lha (guest, #86) [Link]

I am not deeply familiar with any of the Tex stuff but while it may be professional I am not sure that it is press ready.

TeX is perfectly capable of producing press ready copy, and I have seen many books typeset with TeX and have myself had articles published directly from my LaTeX source. In my experience the LaTeX output from my laser printer has been identical to what was published. TeX has a unix style design (i.e. lots of small programs to do one big job), where I would use "dvips" to create postscript for printing on my laser printer from TeX's output, a professional publisher would use a different program to produce output for a printing press,for producing photo-ready copy or galley proofs.

What TeX is good at is producing textbook style typesetting with excellent support for equations, mostly in black and white (so things like colour seperation is not an issue). What it isn't good at is flashy colourful magazine or newspaper style layouts which is where DTP software like Quark Xpress rules the roost.

What does it mean to be press ready?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 20:39 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

Generally I believe "press-ready" is meant to convey that the product is capable of producing CMYK separations, handling trapping, spot color plates, and things like this. TeX, as wonderful as it is, doesn't do this.

Yes, TeX and associates can do all that stuff

Posted Jul 16, 2003 23:14 UTC (Wed) by wjhenney (guest, #11768) [Link]

See, for example http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/papers/color.pdf

What does it mean to be press ready?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 20:28 UTC (Wed) by andrel (guest, #5166) [Link]

TeX and LaTeX are regularly used to produce camera-ready output for scientific manuscripts. There is no need for the added expense of a page layout program, and the academic publishers who ask for TeX are not retypsetting the book using another program. Some journal publishers (AMS comes to mind) also work directly from LaTeX because the hardcopy and web editions are easy to produce from the same source file.

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