 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Producing PC Update Gary Taig garyt@melbpc.org.au |
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Without doubt, there would be many ways one could produce a colour magazine but none of them could be as easy as doing the job on a personal computer. Today's tools are simply awesome when compared with those available just a few short years ago.
In the not-so-distant past you would send all your prepared text, pictures and graphics to a printer, together with a hand-drawn mockup of your publication. You or your artist would have prepared the mockup using perhaps ink and colour pencils, but regardless of the materials or methods employed, this was your one opportunity to tell the printer exactly what you required.
After a multitude of processes, many of them quite complex and time consuming, colour proofs would be made for your final approval. At that stage you'd almost be at the point of no return. Changes would still be possible, but only at considerable cost.
With a small exception, PC Update is produced entirely on PCs, and produced at comparatively low cost. We'll cover the exception later but first, let's look at some of the processes used in producing a colour magazine. We'll start from the other end with a brief look at the printing press; that important part over which we have little, if any control.
The Printing Press
PC Update is printed on a web-style press. The main feature of the web is the way in which a large roll of paper stock is fed into one end, passing between a number of cylinders, or rollers. You may have seen film clips of a newspaper being printed, that's a similar operation.
As the paper passes between these cylinders, ink is applied to both sides, producing a total of 16 pages, eight on each side of the paper. When cut off and folded at the end of the press those 16 pages become one section of the magazine. More on that in a moment.
On its brief, high-speed journey through the press the paper has four different colours of ink applied; Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. You may have seen the acronym CMYK, now you know its origin. Almost any colour of the spectrum can be produced by applying varying amounts of each of those colours and we'll talk about them in more detail shortly.
After the ink is applied, the paper passes through a drying oven. The ink is not thoroughly dried at that stage but the oven does a good enough job to allow the paper to be cut and folded immediately it comes out the end of the press.
The exit end of the web is known as the folding unit, where the paper is passed over a triangular shape to start the folding process before it goes through a series of rollers and blades. The end result is a folded and cut, but not yet trimmed section of 16 pages.
A 64-page PC Update like this issue is made up of four 16-page sections. You'll notice that the page count is always a multiple of 16. That's the most cost-effective way to print. It follows also that when a magazine is made up of four different sections, then the machine must be stopped and the printing plates changed for each new section.
The web style machine that Wilke Color uses mostly for PC Update is a Mitsubishi L750, capable of printing over 40,000 copies per hour. Needless to say, our relatively small run of just under 12,000 copies is done in little more than a few minutes. In fact, the machine never reaches its full speed before the next change of plates. Mind boggling, isn't it?
Plate changing and other down time takes far longer than the actual printing and folding. PC Update is usually completed in about four hours, depending on the number of sections. Each change of plates involves removing the old and loading new plates onto the cylinders, cleaning them, starting the paper feed firstly at low speed, then adjusting the ink flow and so on, until such time asthe colour is correct, and then they can begin to speed up the machine. Wouldn't it be frustrating, you'd feel inclined to let it run and do some real work, rather than shut it down again, almost immediately. It's easy to understand why our incremental cost for extra copies is minimal; with little more than the additional paper costs affecting price.
A 16-page Section
Examine Figure 1 for a glimpse of what is known as an imposition. This is one side of one 16-page section of April 1994 PC Update and shows the relative location of the pages in that section. When the printed sheet is folded some of the top edges of adjacent pages are still closed and they remain closed until the binding stage where the respective sections are stitched together and the magazine is trimmed to its final dimensions. You'll notice something else too, if you get out your April 1994 PC Update. What do pages 1, 4, 5, 8, 73, 76, 77 and 80 all have in common? See if you can work it out.
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Wow! We just went through many years of development, many years of trial and error and heartache for the printing trade, in but a few short paragraphs. It's quite sufficient for this exercise though because the main purpose of this article is to describe the processes involved and how we do our part in the lead up to
PC Update reaching Wilke Color.
Printing Plates
The printer uses special metal plates. We don't see them nor do we play any significant part in making them. We simply give the printer the film he requires to make his plates. The platemaking process is a little bit like when you take a negative to the local camera shop and ask the operator to print a photograph. The operator exposes some chemically treated paper to light, where that light shines through your negative. Then the exposed paper is placed into a developing tank (in the dark!) where chemicals bring out the image. These chemicals have an effect on the parts of the paper that were exposed to light, and in the case of a photograph, to varying amounts of light. The result is you have a print of your negative.
Making plates for use on a web-style printing press requires positive film, not negative, but apart from that the process is very similar. When we produce
PC Update we make the required positive film and deliver it to the printer.
Film Making
Our film is made in a way very similar to that process employed when you take your original photograph. As you take a photo you expose your film to light and when the film is chemically treated it becomes a negative. The intensity of the light coming through your camera lens varies, and thus varies the effect of the developing chemical. That's the method used to show different colours and tones; all the shades from light to dark in photography. The film for
PC Update is also exposed to light but instead of the light being flashed onto the surface, like with a camera where your shutter is open for a split second, the light for our film is a very thin beam, directed onto the film with extreme precision.
Monochrome Film
Monochrome film is used where one colour only is required; usually black. If you look at page 24 of this issue you'll see Dirty Dave Mitchell's photo in black. Dave's picture doesn't appear to be all black, does it? It has grey shades that provide the depth for the three-dimensional image. The grey shades are achieved by using a process known as screening. If you examine Dave's picture with a powerful magnifying glass you'll notice that lighter grey areas are simply the result of less dots printed on the page. The size of the clusters of dots varies too, but the result while so simple, is very effective isn't it?
Colour Separations
The CMYK colour process requires four pieces of film; one for each colour. Naturally of course, that also means one for each printing plate. Just in case it didn't occur to you earlier, each colour is applied from a different printing plate as the paper passes through the rollers on the web.
In the earlier days, when you took your colour photograph to a printer for inclusion in your publication, he would photograph it four times using a different colour filter each time. As a result he would have four different negatives, each having the required intensity of each of the four colours. From there the printer would make four separate printing plates and at the end of the print job, having applied the correct amount of each colour of ink, he had successfully reproduced your photograph. Modern DTP software will read a TIFF or PCX or other popular file format and separate it into those four colours.
The Imagesetter
The film we give the printer comes out of an imagesetter. That's a word you may have seen but not understood. Well, the imagesetter can be likened to a large PostScript printer except that it produces its output onto film, rather than paper. The exposed film is then fed into a developing tank.
Now, finally, we've reached the stage where you know exactly what's happening. You know all about PostScript, don't you? For those who have not encountered it yet, PostScript is a language developed to enable computers to communicate with printers. I once knew a chap who could sit at the keyboard and type PostScript commands straight out to his printer. He was a nut! Fancy spending a greater part of your life learning one of the most obscure languages in existence. However, he could make that printer talk, I'll give him that much.
PostScript Files
If you have a PostScript printer driver on your computer, reconfigure your software to send the printer output to a file on disk instead of to the printer. Set it up to use the PostScript printer driver and then print. Now use List or XTree or some other file viewer to examine the file. You will see a few lines of identifying header followed by many thousands of lines of this obscure PostScript language. You won't understand it! I don't. But a PostScript printer surely does. So does the imagesetter. It can handle the most complex files of immense size. We frequently send 30 or 50 megabyte files to this clever little box and it eats 'em! The largest file to date was about 90 megabytes. Imagine that. What did you say was the capacity of your hard disk?
Thanks to the way the light is exposed to (or directed at) the film in the imagesetter, it can produce images of up to 3200 dots per inch (dpi) resolution. This is high! In fact it gets close to the resolution of a photograph. Well, close enough anyway for this exercise. Many photographers and others in the trade will want to shoot me for that statement but compare 3200 dpi with your average high quality laser printer running at 300 or 600 dpi and you'll understand what I mean.
Now we have covered everything from the PostScript file to the printing press. Summarising briefly at this point, we have the following steps:
- We produce all PC Update output as PostScript files.
- The PostScript file is fed into an imagesetter.
- The imagesetter makes (positive) film of that image (usually one page at a time)
- The film is sent to Wilke Color.
- Wilke makes printing plates from that film.
- The plates are loaded onto the web press from where the magazine is printed and folded into sections.
- The individual sections are stitched together, with some glue applied, and PC Update is trimmed to size.
That's a good start. Now that you have a broad idea of the physical processes let's look briefly at the more delicate side of the production cycle, the typesetting and layout. We'll get physical again shortly.
The First Step - Text
Text given to the printer several years ago would have to be typed onto plain paper. You or your typist would do that job, and you'd be sure to proofread it thoroughly before giving it to the printer. However, the old fashioned typesetter would then have to sit and rekey all of that text into his typesetting machine. Then someone would have to check his work against that which you had provided.
What a job, and think about all that doubling up with so much opportunity for error.
These days we take a disk from the author and simply type "copy a:\book.txt c:", or download a file from the BBS. Easy? Not always so. Even with spelling checkers and the myriad of tools available, authors still hand in text containing errors. But think about the vast savings in time. Compare that with the time required to rekey an entire book and then proofread it. Not only that, the old typesetter produced its output on long strips of bromide-like material known as galleys of text. For every error discovered the poor typesetter would have to rekey an entire strip! These days one can simply highlight some text on the screen, delete it, rekey a word or two and hit the print button.
However, apart from the relatively small number of problems one encounters along the way, when producing PC Update, or any publication, one must have some text to begin with. We load that text into the desktop publishing software, in this case Corel VENTURA and it simply falls into place, in accordance with some preparation done beforehand. I'll cover that preparation in a little more detail when we get to the bit about Ventura tags.
Layout
Page layout is an art and everyone has a different view on how a page should look. Modern tools allow you to do whatever you like. We have a general rule in PC Update that where possible we try to have at least one graphic or photograph on each page, to break up the text. There's nothing more boring than to read page after page of text without something to break it up; although on these pages I've defied that rule. The next thing we try to achieve is when a picture or graphic is positioned, we endeavour to follow the top left to bottom right rule. This is where you start reading a block of text at the top left corner of a page and follow the natural eye movement towards the bottom right. In other words, pictures would be positioned at the lower left and/or the top right. The spread on pages 56 and 57 are a reasonably good example of this.
We avoid placing pictures or screen shots in the middle of a column of text. This is so that the reader can easily follow the text of an article and isn't suddenly required to scan several possibilities on the page to find where to continue reading.
Pictures
Most photographs we use are scanned with the Hewlett-Packard ScanJet IIC. It's a colour scanner and we save the files in TIFF format. At the time we went to colour we experimented a lot with other formats but eventually settled on TIFF because Ventura handles them well. Unfortunately we have not yet managed to obtain all our own photographs and the quality of many of the pictures in PC Update is determined by the quality of the original, rather than the method used to capture them. However, when we wish to place a photo on a page we simply draw a frame with the tools provided and import the appropriate TIFF file. Many of you would have already played with the capabilities of some of the newer word processors and imported graphics into your page. The process is similar except that the incredible power of Ventura takes over from that point onwards.
Photographs that are provided as colour positives (slides) are sent out to a bureau for scanning on a drum scanner. We don't have the need for one of those and they're quite expensive. The drum scanner still produces a TIFF file though, and we can use that file in exactly the same way as one produced by the ScanJet. TIFF is a well-proven, popular format.
Advertisements
Advertising space can be booked in a multitude of sizes but the most common are full page, half page, 1/4 page and business card size. Full page ads are much preferred from the point of view of assembling the magazine, we simply obtain the film for that particular page direct from the advertiser. He or she would already have employed an agency to design the ad, probably on a PC, and they would have sent it through an imagesetter to make film, same as we do for all the other pages. When the advertiser provides film we are saved the cost of making it.
Remember I mentioned a small exception, right back at the start. Sometimes an advertiser provides what is known as a bromide. This is exactly the same as a photograph of the advertisement. In fact, photos are printed on bromide covered paper. The process is for all intents and purposes, identical. Anyway, if we are provided with a bromide we must give that to the printer and he makes a piece of film from it. On other occasions an advertiser might give us a small piece of film. In that instance the bromide-to-film stage is omitted but still, we don't produce those pages in their entirety. The advertisement is a separate item that must be given to the printer separately.
In a real life situation much cutting and pasting goes on with the film used in plate making. Traditionally printers might receive (say) half a page of text, perhaps the top half, on one piece of film, then in the same envelope he would find the film for an advertisement for the bottom half, which he would join to the top half before making his printing plate. This process of joining the two pieces of film is known as stripping them together. Or, since quite often an advertisement takes up only a small portion of a page, the film for the advert is stripped into the other piece of film. Let's examine a similar exercise.
Imagine if you found a negative from an old group photo from your school days and all except one individual were still your very close friends. With the right tools you could cut out the offending head from the negative, find a similar negative from a photo of another friend, cut it out to exactly the same shape and size as the hole you just made in the first negative, and then strip the small piece containing the preferred head, into the first negative. That's exactly how printers traditionally insert small advertisements into a page.
Now, with PC Update we go one better than that. Where ever possible we ask the advertiser for his or her (small) advertisements in electronic form; In other words, as a file on disk. We make a frame on our page, import that file into the frame and at the right time, we send our entire page to the imagesetter, all in one hit. There's no cutting and pasting to be done by the printer, we have more control over the precise location of the advertisement on the page and ultimately, there is less cost for everyone involved.
Whilst this is our preferred option, would you care to imagine the trouble we have obtaining compatible files from advertisers?
Some are quite good at it, or they employ professionals; we have little trouble with those. However, I've spent many hours recovering data out of poorly made advertisements. Often it's much quicker to start CorelDRAW! and re-create the entire advertisement. The trade-off is
a huge saving in time further down the production track, because every little advertisement that is physically separate from the main page of film, has to be thoroughly documented and given to the printer in such a way that he is left with no chance of a mistake when stripping it into the page. I'm sure ads have been placed on wrong pages before today, irrespective of the level of professionalism of the printing company.
Back to the Text
Earlier I mentioned Ventura tags. These define the appearance of the text and can be likened to the junk-like control characters you find in your word processor files except that often they are more easily identifiable. Have a look at Figure 7 opposite and you'll see an ASCII version of the first few lines of text of this article. I've printed the tags in bold type so that they're easily seen. Ventura reads and understands these special strings and formats the text according to the definition stored in the current style sheet. As the name implies, a style sheet is a set of rules and instructions developed for a particular style of document. Actually, when you prepare the text from within Ventura it automatically adds the tags for you, but often it's much quicker to add all that tagging first, rather than do it from inside Ventura.
Prior to tagging we edit the text for style and correctness. Spelling checks have already been done but some still manage to creep through. When we're happy with the text we do some manual tagging with our favourite text editor and load the text into Ventura. If graphics or pictures are required we add some appropriately sized frames in the most suitable spots, import the pictures and view the results.
Putting it Together
Once a text file is loaded into Ventura and we've added the pictures and graphics the final editing begins. This is where some of the most time consuming work takes place. Rarely does an article finish exactly at the bottom of a page!
If an article takes up (say) 11/3 pages we must seriously consider locating an advertisement (or two) on a previous page, in order to force the text to the bottom of the next page. Sometimes, if the overrun is just a few lines we must reduce the space used and often that involves rewriting a paragraph, or perhaps just the odd sentence here and there, paraphrasing it in order to reduce the number of words, hence the number of lines. Often an imperceptible (to the untrained eye) change of column width helps a little. Sometimes we can change the page from two to three columns and that makes all the difference. Regardless, the final layout work presents the biggest challenge.
When the page, or a chapter of several pages is finished we print it for what we hope is almost the last time. We fax copies to each other for proofreading and suggestions for improvement. When we're completely happy with it the chapter is printed out to a PostScript file suitable for the imagesetter, printed yet again to prove it's OK, (especially for those tricky colour separations) and the PostScript file is stored in a special directory ready to be sent to have film made.
A typical PC Update will make anywhere from 150 to 300 MB of PostScript files. These are sent on tape to Stephen Davey in Geelong. Stephen sends them through the imagesetter, then lets us know if any crashed along the way or came out wrong, requiring rework. He then sends the film back for documenting, for attaching those loose bits of film and bromide advertising and finally, delivery to Wilke. Stephen also designs the front cover each month. He has done that job for several years.
Now you have a broad overview of most of the processes involved. There is one last but very important item to cover. It involves designing the magazine each month and filling it with interesting and appropriate reading matter.
The Cost Consideration
The most important consideration in the design of PC Update is keeping the cost within budget. Income from advertising revenue helps offset the amount of members' funds used but that revenue varies each month. Therefore, so must the size of PC Update and the number of colour pages. The most economical method of printing is 16-page sections, so we must fit the available material into either 64, 80 or 96 pages. Often that's a difficult decision because at times there will be an abundance of articles from members and less advertising. Other times it will be plenty of advertising and barely sufficient content.
The Overall Design
Some feature articles and reviews are much better presented in colour, so we try to have enough colour pages to cater for those. At the beginning of PC Update production we collect and summarise all advertising information, we do a page count of articles that are best presented in colour and establish before anything else, the number of colour pages. Then comes the task of deciding where to locate the colour pages. If you did as I suggested and found your April 1994 PC Update you'd have noticed all those pages I mentioned were colour and therefore, that side of the 16-page section was all colour. The most suitable location for colour pages must be established before anything else is set in concrete.
Sourcing Material
Ash and Peter do this. Ash is responsible for reviews and he is constantly in touch with software publishers, trying to obtain new releases of software for our team of product reviewers (authors).
Peter finds the feature articles and selects what we publish from month to month, always attempting to maintain an even balance between beginners' and advanced readers' articles. For both, these tasks involve many hours of unseen work.
As I write this we are about to hold our first meeting of PC Update volunteers. If you have skills that you feel could possibly be utilised on PC Update, we welcome your contact.
Reprinted from the December 1994 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
