Digital Workflow for Book Publishing (I)
(Digital Workflow: Managing the Process Electronically)
Director's guide:
From the invention of the printing press to the appearance of the computer, which has been going on for centuries, during this long period of time, there has been little progress in printing and publishing technology, and the book publishing process has not changed. However, with the advent of computers, unprecedented changes have taken place in this field. The update cycle of printing and publishing technologies has been shortened to several years or even several months. The changes in the publishing process have followed, and the various steps in the publishing process have been followed. A continuous electronic system can be formed by these technologies, which we call digital workflow.
Usually a book publishing process includes six items: content creation, editing, copying, distribution, marketing, and archiving. For a long period of time, publishers have independently manipulated these steps to achieve automation. Today, publishers can connect them through digital workflows to form a fully automated process.
This article gives a quick review of the development of printing and publishing technologies over the past three decades, replacing lead and fire from photo-composition, to the birth of computer-based plate-making and desktop publishing systems, especially after the 1990s, various publishing software, computer applications, and The development of the Internet has changed the process of transmission of information from author to reader, and has also changed the way authors, publishers, printers, and other practitioners work. A new digital workflow not only shortens the work cycle, improves product quality, but also reduces internal costs. At the same time, the development of a digitized workflow for book publishing can be carried out jointly by many parties, such as software vendors, technology service providers, etc., so that the new cost of equipment, software updates and personnel training does not have to be entirely borne by the publisher. This article is based on the several major steps of book publishing as the basic clues, combined with a variety of external environments, and a comprehensive introduction to the digital workflow of book publishing. It also made a comprehensive analysis of the various impacts of digital workflow on book publishing and the advantages of digital workflow.
First, content generation The current author is generally written through word processing software, especially for many academics. The research on weekdays may be conducted entirely in the electronic environment. Therefore, it is logical to synthesize their research data and results in a digital form. Yes, some complex software includes various scientific formulas and symbols, and has become the main writing tool for some science and technology authors.
After the author finishes his work in electronic form, he or she must send a copy of the work to the publisher, which may be provided on disk, or transmitted electronically via e-mail, FTP, or URL.
<submission of electronic manuscript>
Definition: Electronic submission, where the author submits the manuscript to the publisher on disk or through the Internet (e-mail, FTP, or HTTP).
Process: Most publishers provide authors with guides for manuscript submission. These guides usually include templates for authors to prepare manuscripts. The requirements for most of the templates are focused on textual specifications for text sizes and layouts. In fact, the most used model is still Word, and some publishers require the use of special software such as LaTex. Such complex scientific formulas and symbols can be directly processed in the digital workflow. Publishers can specify technical models that can be electronically received. In addition to LaTex, commonly used modes are Tiff, GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), and RIF document formats. A few publishers even want authors to use SGML and specify the corresponding DTDs (document type definitions). For some special types of publishing, such as IEEE processing methods, publishers are required to accept only manuscripts, unless pre-editors provide other modes.
Common problems:
The prevalent problem is that authors often do not follow the guidance to submit the manuscript. In this way, the manuscript must be transferred from a word processing software to another word processing software after it reaches the publishing house. Although this work is not difficult, it will waste a lot of time and money from publishers.
Another problem exists in the FTP upload process because the naming of each site is complicated, and there are a series of steps when the author uploads the manuscript to the publisher's FTP site. Inadequate errors can occur and the manuscript cannot be published. Business hands. Therefore, truly uploading documents to FTP depends on the author's technical mastery and site reliability.
Second, editing and processing In the digital workflow, manuscripts exist in electronic form, so the contents of editing and processing are different from the manuscripts that are processed in black and white. It includes three items: reviewing, editing, and coding.
(1) The first step in reviewing the manuscript is to review the manuscript, review the quality and importance of the manuscript. At the same time, the review process also needs to find out and point out problems in the manuscript for reference. In the electronic workflow, you can use auto tracking software to do this automatically. There are several advantages to implementing this kind of electronic review. First, it can improve the quality of review and improve the efficiency of review. Then, you can provide some useful data, such as the average time for each review, the number of submissions, the number of manuscripts received, the number of returned manuscripts, the number of returned manuscripts, and of course, the most important is the electronic reviewer, ready for the subsequent digitization workflow. Electronic manuscript for editing.
<About electronic review>
Definition: The process of electronic review of a manuscript is the entire process of a digital manuscript from receiving it to passing to the reviewer and finally making a review decision. Each participant (editors, reviewers, authors) can print a copy of the original. Of course, all these transmissions are made electronically.
Process: The electronic reviewer begins with the backup of the digitized manuscript submitted by the author. The manuscript can be judged according to the standards in the computer database, and then the reviewer's opinion will be returned automatically. Once editors decide to use these manuscripts, review comments will be automatically sent to the author.
Electronic reviewers originally originated from the internal systems developed by some large publishers. Now there are many such software options, such as Editorial Assistant, Global Editor, and Manuscript Central. If publishers have not fully automated the review, they can resort to such software. They can also copy, track, and connect to complete the entire digital workflow.
The pervasive problem: The common problem is that the cost of developing an original manuscript tracking system is too high and it is expensive to buy. In addition, these systems developed for commercial purposes have their power, but they also have their own shortcomings. A common shortcoming is the limited ability to target specific publishing projects and the lack of individual adaptability.
(B) Although the editors of different manuscripts have different levels and contents, they can be divided into two categories. One is substantive content editing, and the other is technical editing, including style, format, grammar, and punctuation. The normative of the format. Electronic or screen editing makes the latter accurate. If the editor has mastered the appropriate editing tools and uses them properly, online editing is much faster than paper and ink era editing because the editor's internal modifications of the manuscript can be directly derived and the revised manuscripts exist in digitized form. You can directly page layout.
<About Electronic Editing>
Definitions: 1. Also often referred to as screen editing, it is done on a computer, not in a pen and ink environment. 2. The computer program has converted the manuscript to a standard format and completed preparations before editing.
Process: If the author does not use a template-based or prescribed word processing program provided by the publisher, the editor must first convert the format after receiving the manuscript. For this reason, most publishers and printers develop specialized applications to systematize these processes. The editors directly make changes in the document. The revised drafts received by the author appear in the form of clear school, but all the modified places will be marked with different colors or fonts. In addition to using these programs developed by publishers themselves, it is also possible to use computer programs to perform such tasks as PowerEditor, Librosystem, Istedi, etc. These programs can have basic grammatical functions, such as correcting grammatical mistakes, correcting spelling errors, or Misuse of punctuation. In addition, these programs can insert formats, such as abbreviations, technical terms, and title formats, as needed.
(3) After the coded manuscript is edited, it needs to be coded. At this time, the file may select SGML, XML, or HTML tags as the typesetting codes. These typesetting codes tell the typesetting person the specific publication format of the file and thus perform the typesetting. In addition to serving typography, SGML and XML have more uses. They are media neutral formats that ensure that the file content is used again in different media. It is also electronic SGML that has this function. Publishers choose to add SGML tags at different stages. Some add SGML tags at the beginning, and some are added at the time of technical editing, while others are only at the last step before copying. Join.
<About coding>
Definition: Coding is the tagging of elements in a file to describe their structure, content, and expected style.
Process: The purpose of tagging different elements is to tell the typer how to arrange these elements, such as what is the title, what is the arrangement and so on. Current markup languages ​​such as SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) are used to describe the content and structure of files. Among them, SGML is very complex. It separates the content from the representation form. The text content is written in simple ASCII code and is independent of the platform. The manifestation of the document is represented by a code, and the tags in the brackets indicate the roles of the various elements, such as titles, subtitles, and corner notes. So SGML files can be used for many different media. Publishers can edit SGML tags as needed, either in full-text encoding or partially in addition to SGML tags (for example, only titles and corner notes), and the text is in PDF format.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is developed specifically for the Internet. It is much simpler than SGML and does not require the use of DTDs. The included coding is only a fixed group. But it is also this simplicity that determines the limitations of HTML. It can only be used for Internet transmission and not for archiving.
SGML is too complicated and HTML has obvious shortcomings. For these two problems, people have chosen a middle school to use a new standard such as XML. It is simpler than SGML and only has a set of DTDs, but it is more elaborate than HTML. many.