What does it mean to be press ready? [LWN.net]

What does it mean to be press ready?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 20:17 UTC (Wed) by dr_lha (guest, #86)
In reply to: What does it mean to be press ready? by jmalcolm
Parent article: Scribus 1.0 released

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.

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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