This is one of the most common questions I am asked, still to this day.



A client has created their manuscript in Word.



They have bolded and italicized and put in headings and sometimes page numbers and running heads.



They have even pasted pictures into their Word document and tell me, "All it needs is a little clean up and it's ready to go to print. Right?"



Wrong.



Books are professionally typeset in InDesign or Quark Xpress.



The Word document becomes extinct once it is imported into one of these page layout programs.



I will use inDesign to mean "professional page layout program" for simplicity's sake.



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Why can't I just fix up the Word Doc and make a book?







I work in inDesign.



inDesign gives me the ability to set up master pages, paragraph and character style sheets, control things like kerning, tracking, widows and orphans, hi res graphic placement and manipulation and so much more.







A picture pasted into Word is just a "screen representation." it is no longer a graphic. And - it's often a screen shot or low resolution (72 dpi RGB) image when it needs to be a HIGH RES, grayscale or CMYK tif or eps image separate from the document itself.







The pictures are then "linked" when they are placed into the inDesign layout and the fonts and pictures are "collected" and the document is run through a pre-flight program to check for missing fonts, it checks resolution and type of graphics and all that good stuff that printers need in order to use the final "printer-ready PDF file" to print from.







Preparing a Word document is a very important step for the typesetter and something I will cover in an upcoming Blog Entry very soon.







Sue



JustYourType.biz book design and book typesetting