> Typesetting and layout

Smart typesetting

Advanced text coding and pre-tagging allow smart, cost-effective typesetting and layout for all books, especially for long texts using standard templates.

Positioning text and images on pages is a relatively straightforward process, which can be accomplished to a certain standard by almost anyone. But smart typesetting involves a great deal more than this. For the last twenty years Carnegie Book Production has been developing a range of skills, techniques and procedures which can be of benefit to a very wide range of production challenges, from highly designed coffee-table books to ‘simple’ text setting.

Before we begin

What makes our service different and – we believe – smarter is what happens to the text before ir finds its way into the layout programme.

1. First, we capture the text and check it.
2. We then clean up the text, removing duplicated or unused codes which could cause problems later.
3. If there are footnotes or endnotes we convert, verify and sort these out so that they will appear in the correct place and format.
4. All of the text is then joined together so that all subsequent operations are performed on the whole book at once.
5. We then run a set of routines, curtomised to some extent for each book, which prepare the book for typesetting.
6. By this stage the text is clean, free of extraneous codes, and prepared for running to page.
7. The final process (initially developed years ago for use with Ventura Publisher, version 4!) is to pre-tag every paragraph of text. This semi-automatic process can be customised for use with almost any page layout programme and speeds up page layout enormously. It also helps guarantee consistency and robust transportability of text from one application to another.

As well as speeding up the typesetting, this process also improves the quality and robustness of the coding, which means that the text can easily be used in variety of ways, from book to PDF, xml, ebook or web content.

This text capture and typesetting procedure has the capability to produce books quickly and effectively with a high degree of automation. If your books conform to standard designs, this can mean huge cost savings as text can be customised for extremely fast and rubust typesetting and layout.