Looking forward to the plate-making technology of the publishing industry in the 21st century
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1. The status quo of academic works and its production technology trends
The rapid advancement and development of academics has always been the mainstay of the publishing house, and it can no longer be expected. Textbooks for universities are also increasingly declining due to the tendency of children to read books. Academic specialization, segmentation, and the development of interdisciplinary led to a reduction in the number of readers. The volume of each publication is getting smaller and smaller. The reduction in the volume of publications is related to the increase in pricing. Looking forward to maintaining the low price by increasing the profit from the printing volume, it is impossible to increase the printing volume due to the fatigue of the distribution. Therefore, the high price of academic books and the suppression of purchases have formed a vicious circle. In the production of books, the proportion of the cost of group editions, plate making, and graphics in pricing is increasing due to the decrease in the number of prints. The solution is quite discretionary, and the tendency of the fixed fee ratio is high. Even if technological innovation is adopted, it is difficult to avoid. . The use of computers in the production technology of academic books is not unrelated to the original price.
As a feature of academic books, first of all, it is impossible to ask for a large amount of prints, and in terms of its contents, it is mostly a difficult book. Most of the production equipment is for publications with large prints, colors, and styles. At any stage of prepress, press, and postpress, there is a big problem that does not match the capabilities of the production equipment. Although the four-color offset printing press has been widely used, it is completely unsuitable for printing academic books. As far as the prepress stage is concerned, the simple grouping operation can be successfully completed by the computer version, but because the cost is already quite cheap, it cannot be Too much expectation to reduce costs. For group editions with high cost and various types of texts (for example, classical reading materials), it is very difficult to deal with, and the group version with many calculation formulas and tables, because the current grouping technology is not high, although it pays more editing and proofreading energy, It is difficult to meet the quality requirements of the group version. In addition, in publications with a small number of prints, the proportion of the cost of the plate edition in the cost of plate making is bound to increase. For large-volume publications, because of the concentrated investment in printing equipment and post-press equipment, academic books that are not destined for printing are certainly mismatched, but their ratio in cost is relatively small. The pre-press part that is particularly important can be roughly divided into group version, plate (photo), plate making, printing, etc. The current trends of production technology are as follows.
2. Production Technology Trends (1) Group Edition
In the past, the main type of the main type was almost completely eliminated and replaced with the computer version. Although the early phototypesetting system is still available and the reliability is not low, the adoption is decreasing due to the relatively high equipment cost. The most notable now is the Desktop Publishing System (DTP), which has much lower equipment costs than the original phototypesetting system. Therefore, how to replace the old equipment when formulating a new plan must be carefully the study. Most platforms now use Macintosh computers, which increases the tendency to switch to 90% of the Windows family.
The DTP still has two major problems: the type of text, the font, and the rules of the group. It provides a variety of fonts to basically meet the requirements, the so-called type of text refers to the number of characters and their limitations, the font usually refers to the number of strokes and stroke direction of each word. DTP is essentially open, with the premise of interchangeability between computers. It uses a common code number to specify the text and is used between various computers. Other characters cannot be exchanged in principle.
Although the original phototypesetting system also uses a computer, the system is closed (closed) and is generally used only in the same company, so the text used is of course used after each production. The number of characters in the shape is of course limited. The standard "JIS X 0208-1997 7-bit (bit) and 8 (bit) two-byte (byte) symbolic Chinese character set for information exchange" was divided into the first set and the second set of two levels. There are 6355 Chinese characters. The first standard was 1978, the second standard was 1983, the third standard was 1990, and the fourth standard was published in 1997.
The standard was originally formulated for the internal processing of the government and enterprises. Therefore, it focuses on the use of Chinese characters for names and names used in administrative and office work. Some people have criticized that although it is sufficient to measure from office use, it is obviously not enough for the number of words required for general publications. When the standard was first developed (1978), the computer was far less popular than it is now, so the publishing industry ignored the standard and did not pose any problem. Since 1969, the publishing industry has adopted a system that has been operating, and its memory is free to use.
The publishing industry uses fonts of commonly used Chinese characters, while the off-balance Chinese characters have always used the font of the Kangxi Dictionary as a positive character. The off-balance Chinese character font of this commonly used Chinese character is not included in the JIS code. At this point, the tendency of DTP as a text group version was revealed at once. Input, editing (group) and output are performed by each unit. Since the data has been exchanged by the JIS code, if the word type and font other than the JIS code are used, even if the data is made, the data cannot be easily performed. The object of the exchange. The supplementary standards of JIS are under planning. The third and fourth sets of about 5,000 Chinese characters are also intensified. It is planned to set standards at the end of this year. If it is actually installed in various computers, it can solve the problem to a considerable extent. (For details, see the Fifth Proceedings of the 5th China-Japan Publishing Education Intercollegiate Academic Exchange Conference in 1997). Followed by the rules of the group rules. The current DTP suite software is almost entirely made by adding Japanese group software to US software. There is a conflict between the original Western language group rules and the Japanese group rules. Justification refers to the Western text adjustment, which is quite different from the Japanese word count. There is no concept of text arrangement in Western languages, and the text in Japanese is square. The premise of the font design is the square font, which can be adjusted only by increasing or decreasing the type of character. The DTP group version software is usually adjusted on the display screen in the form of "WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get", so it is difficult to unify all. If the adjustment is much more, the correction after correction (addition and subtraction of text) needs to be redone from scratch. The DTP version is usually premised on a complete manuscript, and this requirement is simply impossible.
There are many operating methods that do not conform to the traditional Japanese group rules (not necessarily written rules). The reason why the group staff do not master the rules of the group rules is because they mistakenly believe that they can be grouped as long as they are proficient in operating the computer. The reason. Field operators are often interested in computer operating techniques and never care about the rules of the group, and do not pay attention to educational and training venues.
The JIS X 4051-1995 Japanese Instrument Group Edition Act clearly lists the group rule bases and is loaded into various group software.
Plans to expand the standard to page grouping are in progress. The Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS), entitled "Designated Exchange Format for Japanese Instruments", is being prepared and may be issued at the end of this year. The purpose is to use the computer, the author, editor, group editor to send the necessary instructions (command) at each stage of the operation can exchange various files including the group information. It does not have to consider the book body owned by each department, and can select a similar book body to output. At present, although the DTP group version does not meet the quality of the group required by the publishing industry, most of them still use the DTP group version. To prevent the quality of the layout from falling, it depends on the improvement of the software and the educational training of the panelists.
3. Production Technology Trends (2) Graphic (Photo)
The kind of technicians who used to manually paint their work in the past are gone, and most of them have switched to computers for DTP mapping. The manual phototypesetting machine for text imposition is no longer manufactured, so text manuscripts are handled by DTP. The camera has almost no contact with the screen screen and replaced with a monochrome color separation scanner (monochrome scanner)scanning. With the rapid spread of digital cameras, the transition from silver salt type analog photography to digital photography has been made. This allows it to be entered directly into the computer and is now mostly used in the DTP version. Photographic tones are now almost no longer using a airbrush but a computer for picture correction. Color platemaking is now divided into large-scale devices such as layout printers and DTP using Macintosh.
4. Production Technology Trends (3) Plate Making
The printing plate is usually a method of taking a negative image with a camera by a block copy and then drying the positive image. There is also a method of exposing the data from the computer directly to the film to make a positive image, thereby eliminating the need for photographic paper. At this time, the image must be imported into the same file (file).
The method of directly transferring computer data to a plate (CTP, Computer To Plate) by laser has been put into practical use. The so-called direct platemaking that does not require a film has been adopted in small batch printing.This method of saving the film of the film does have a labor-saving effect, but its disadvantage is that once it is made, it cannot be corrected, and it is necessary to re-plate because there is no film when it is printed.
Recently, Adobe has made the portable text format design (PDF, Portable Document Format) represented by Acrobat practical, and it is attracting attention as a new technology in the future. This is a kind of page-by-page data in a computer through a communication loop. The technology of transmission. It is a plate making method that directly prints the data made by the ordering party, including the plate making genre, onto the printing plate. This method is not used in the original printing plant but must be applied in the open system. At present, it has some unstable places, which are still in the experimental stage and are only used in a few occasions.
5. Production Technology Trends (4) Printing
As an on-demand printing for small-volume printing, the computer data is directly transferred to the plate cylinder of the printing press, which is noticeable because it can reduce the printing inventory. But its relationship with the current issuers is not harmonious. Only in terms of the number of impressions required, the base of the entrusted issue must have a margin (at least 500 copies). You can also consider using the Internet (Internet) distribution method, but it is a book to sell a book, the transaction processing of each order is quite cumbersome, and how to publish the published message is also a problem. It is unrealistic to pass data through the Internet for distribution work.
The cost of producing raw data is exactly the same as the price at the time of production. Therefore, it is not easy to recover the cost by assuming that you can sell a few copies before setting the price.
Conclusion
An overview of the various issues in a modern computer-based book production system. The situation is mobile development, and the future predictions are not easy to be clear. It is self-evident that huge changes will inevitably occur. To this end, I hope that when new technologies appear, they should not be used immediately. Instead, they should calmly judge their interests and gains judgments.