Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1246490 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 656 pages

Book Info
Illustrated text offers a complete up to the minute reference for every graphics arts professional, whether in print or electronic media. Provides an in-depth understanding of today's revolutionary technologies and workflows. DLC: Printing.

Card catalog description
Whether you publish in print or electronic media, you can't get great results without an in-depth understanding of today's revolutionary technologies and workflows. In this book, Frank J. Romano and his co-authors introduce all the concepts and practical techniques you need right now, including: integrating digital prepress with desktop publishing and printing; unraveling the mysteries of color separations and color management; imaging techniques for today's publishing environments; printing with ink, toner, and inkjet printers; and getting great results on the Web and in other electronic media. This profusely illustrated, expert reference contains tips and tricks for virtually every print or electronic publishing project. Whether you're a graphic designer, printer, Web professional, or student, you'll turn to it constantly for answers you just won't find anywhere else.

From the Inside Flap
INTRODUCTION
A president of R.R. Donnelley once said "In a corner of a printing plant in Illinois, there stands a giant printing press that once ran night and day, producing sets of encyclopedias that would line the walls of American homes. Today, it stands silently. It will never run again on a regular basis." Overnight, the preferred medium for encyclopedias switched from print to CD-ROM. People used to pay more than $2,000 for a printed set of encyclopedias. Now they can buy a CD-ROM encyclopedia for $40-or get it free with the purchase of almost any home computer. The advantages over print are obvious. You can search and retrieve information faster and hyperlink to related subjects. There are pictures and sound and even video. With print, a high schooler would copy the text and in the process perhaps actually learn something. Today's cut and paste does not help a student at all. If fact, the encyclopedia is moving beyond the recorded disk. Britannica is on line. All 44 million words-and it is up to date. Multimedia gives you virtually unlimited access to information. Multimedia or digital media or interactive media or electronic publishing or digital publishing - call it what you will - has changed the way in which we present and communicate information. Much of what I see is multi-mediocrity. But the potential is enormous. When it is good, it is mindboggling. When it is bad, it is the norm. We are still in the incunabula period of multimedia. My world is publishing ink-on-paper products. Today printing companies maintain databases, printers stamp CD-ROMs, printers produce multimedia. And by the way, they also put ink on paper or board or plastic or foil. What then is a printer? What then is the printing industry? It does not only print books. There are also magazines and newspapers and journals and catalogs and direct mail and wallpaper and packaging. 80% of what printers print is because someone wants to sell something to someone else. And 70% of what it prints ultimately winds up in a landfill. The pundits and consultants opine that print must die in order that electronic approaches must thrive. This may not be so. Digital media does absorb some volume of the material that might have made it into print. The Adobe web site is the equivalent of over 1 million pages. But much of it is programs and information that might not have made it into print in any case. Those who say print is dead do so in newsletters. The Wall Street Journal described printing as a "sunset industry" a while back. They had to say it in print as well. The key is not to doggedly defend an indefensible position in paper publishing but to look at the entire publishing marketplace and search for an opportunity to change the rules. Book publishers often miss the market by printing too many copies or too few. The front-end costs of printing were so high that a publisher could not afford to print a few and come back later to print a few more if the demand warranted it. Only 2% of the 51,000 plus new book titles printed each year ever make it to a second printing. Like my books. 50% of the magazines you see at the newsstand are thrown away. So my industry developed a concept for taking a publisher's content in digital form and using digital processes to print only as many copies as the publisher needed in the short term. It is called on-demand printing. No inventory. No warehouse. Just-in-time manufacturing. We use ink and toner and inkjet with conventional presses and new printers. There is no neutrality in the Digital Revolution. You must become a digital revolutionary. So, welcome to the new world of prepress, printing and publishing.

Customer Reviews

A mass of information without shape or aim
The author agglomerates a mass of information without any sense of who he is writing for or what exactly he aims to teach. The book is a warehouse of knowledge with information stacked up in it like great piles of lumber. But is it a reference book or an instructional textbook? As the latter it fails. Students won't learn, because they will be overwhelmed with a flood of facts and descriptions that assume more knowledge than they have. As the former, it likewise fails. Experienced practioners looking for references won't easily find the information they want, because any one piece of information gets lost in a great forest of verbiage. Moreover, in terms of style it is wordy and repetitive and full of typos, like a rough draft.

Finally, when reading a book about professional printing that discusses standards of excellence in the industry, one expects that form will reflect content, that the book's own design and typography will exemplify, if unobtrusively, the high standards being discussed. Instead, this book looks like it was done in MS Word in an afternoon. And the index is not only skimpy but done in a font size that is so small and condensed as to be almost unreadable without a magnifying glass. (And without a clear, easy to use and comprehensive index, a book like this becomes almost useless.)

While the author is impressively knowledgeable, we want a book like this to be useful, not just to demonstrate the author's voluminous knowldege. The book should be sent back to the editor for revision aimed at producing a quality textbook with a clear sense of audience and aim, not just cranking out a profit-making tome. The publishers should also take more care with layout and design so the book practices what it preaches instead of contradicting itself from beginning to end.

An excellent primer for the technology but occasional lapses
As a primer for pre-press imaging, and printing, this book is excellent. It is up to date and, in general, it is well written, and easy to read, sometimes with mild humor. However, that said, there are deviations from this standard. Thus there should also have been more explanatory diagrams, and some are illustrative rather than instructional. For example, the explanation of Under Color Removal would have beeen helped considerably by a good diagram.

Unfortunately there are occasional more serious lapses from the generally high standard of writing. Thus, if this reviewer was not already familiar with the concept of unsharp masking, it is doubtful if the explanation on pages 335-336 would have helped! Similarly, in the discussion of Under Color Removal, the sentence "GCR is more powerful an effect than UCR since it affect the whole image, and often 100% is excessive" is distracting and requires thought to understand within the context. Then, the very next paragraph appears to be discussing a picture than does not exist in this book!

If the reader is looking for an explanation of the background science then he/she should look elsewhere. But that does not appear to be the primary purpose of this book. Instead it is excellent primer and introduction to the technology. I am glad I bought it for that purpose.

Elvin T.