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I did a master's thesis using Word, and my thesis advisor got on to me about not taking advantage of all the Word features like styling and proper page-breaking

I did a master's thesis using Word, and my thesis advisor got on to me about not taking advantage of all the Word features like styling and proper page-breaking, etc. A few years later I published a book using Word and my publisher demanded that I not use any of the Word "gimmicks" like styling and page-breaking.

bashinator 5y ago
Now I'm curious about what software is used in actual ink-on-dead-trees book publishing.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  I submitted everything to them in Word documents (one document per chapter). They converted those to PDFs after having applied a lot of formatting and illustrating and sent me back the PDFs to review. If I found any mistakes, I marked up the PDF and sent it back to be updated and re-reviewed. So probably a lot of Adobe software?
- openknot 5y ago
  I assume it's Adobe InDesign, from working at a couple student-run publications in college (allows more precise control over how to format text) and one in high school. I hope an industry expert in publishing can chime in, but in the meantime, it looks like professional users in graphic design subreddits mostly use InDesign, followed by Microsoft Publisher [0][1]. Outside of Reddit sources, Creative Bloq also suggests Affinity Publisher and QuarkXPress, but I can't immediately tell if the rankings are paid for or influenced by advertisers [2]. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Affinity/comments/gdqrux/thinking_of_switching_from_indesign_to_publisher/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Affinity/comments/gdqrux/thinking_o... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/7p9s8q/should_i_be_using_publisher_or_word/ https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/7p9s8q/shou... [2] https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-desktop-publishing-software https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-desktop-publ...
  - bambax 5y ago
    Quark XPress used to be the best publishing software; then their CEO made a number of very bad decisions and they almost disappeared from the scene. The standard is now InDesign. It's very good but very expensive. Affinity Publisher is ok, lacks some advanced features, but is so cheap compared to InDesign it may as well be free. MS Publisher, I'm not sure. Never really heard about it in good or bad.
    - jjeaff 5y ago
      QuarkXpress was not able to preview images on the page for an embarrassingly long time. You would draw a box and import an image to it and it would just keep a box with an x in it to indicate that a picture will be there. You had to render a print preview to see the images.
- malodyets 5y ago
  I have worked in ink-on-dead-trees book publishing for over 20 years. The vast majority of print-interior typesetting is being done with Adobe InDesign. Some publishers (still) have their own system that does not use Word styles - usually using ASCII tags inserted into the content. These are often legacy approaches dating from the 1980s, but if it works why change it? A few have begun to use Markdown-based systems, but this is very rare in commercial publishing. The vast majority of author-to-editor-preproduction workflows are done in Microsoft Word. Some publishers (including the one I worked for, and the ones I work with now) use Word styles for all content formatting. Part of the editorial "pre-production" task is to take what authors give us (font formatting with bold / italic, paragraph formatting with returns and tabs) and convert it to styles.
rchaud 5y ago
Sounds similar to my college professors tut-tutting writing behaviours like run-on sentences when every journal article and book in our syllabus had writers doing exactly that.
asdff 5y ago
Everyone has a workflow and wants the input data cleansed how they like. Science journals are just the worst. So much time and money wasted by researchers just doing things like adding a hundred words to this paragraph for this submission, limiting the references to 30 for that one, putting the images all on one document for this journal, putting them in separate files for that one, making the figures independent, making all subfigures together on one page, using this dpi, using that margin with, page numbers yes, page numbers no. Editors should just ask for submissions to be in plain text, images just uploaded in whatever quality you have them, and then they could have a simple bash script do all their inane formatting and automatically fit sub figures evenly to a page. They'd probably complain this maybe 25 line script I'm imagining would put them out of work, though, so I'm not holding my breath.

bashinator 5y ago

Now I'm curious about what software is used in actual ink-on-dead-trees book publishing.

commandlinefan 5y ago
I submitted everything to them in Word documents (one document per chapter). They converted those to PDFs after having applied a lot of formatting and illustrating and sent me back the PDFs to review. If I found any mistakes, I marked up the PDF and sent it back to be updated and re-reviewed. So probably a lot of Adobe software?
openknot 5y ago
I assume it's Adobe InDesign, from working at a couple student-run publications in college (allows more precise control over how to format text) and one in high school. I hope an industry expert in publishing can chime in, but in the meantime, it looks like professional users in graphic design subreddits mostly use InDesign, followed by Microsoft Publisher [0][1]. Outside of Reddit sources, Creative Bloq also suggests Affinity Publisher and QuarkXPress, but I can't immediately tell if the rankings are paid for or influenced by advertisers [2]. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Affinity/comments/gdqrux/thinking_of_switching_from_indesign_to_publisher/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Affinity/comments/gdqrux/thinking_o... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/7p9s8q/should_i_be_using_publisher_or_word/ https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/7p9s8q/shou... [2] https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-desktop-publishing-software https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-desktop-publ...
- bambax 5y ago
  Quark XPress used to be the best publishing software; then their CEO made a number of very bad decisions and they almost disappeared from the scene. The standard is now InDesign. It's very good but very expensive. Affinity Publisher is ok, lacks some advanced features, but is so cheap compared to InDesign it may as well be free. MS Publisher, I'm not sure. Never really heard about it in good or bad.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    QuarkXpress was not able to preview images on the page for an embarrassingly long time. You would draw a box and import an image to it and it would just keep a box with an x in it to indicate that a picture will be there. You had to render a print preview to see the images.
malodyets 5y ago
I have worked in ink-on-dead-trees book publishing for over 20 years. The vast majority of print-interior typesetting is being done with Adobe InDesign. Some publishers (still) have their own system that does not use Word styles - usually using ASCII tags inserted into the content. These are often legacy approaches dating from the 1980s, but if it works why change it? A few have begun to use Markdown-based systems, but this is very rare in commercial publishing. The vast majority of author-to-editor-preproduction workflows are done in Microsoft Word. Some publishers (including the one I worked for, and the ones I work with now) use Word styles for all content formatting. Part of the editorial "pre-production" task is to take what authors give us (font formatting with bold / italic, paragraph formatting with returns and tabs) and convert it to styles.

rchaud 5y ago

Sounds similar to my college professors tut-tutting writing behaviours like run-on sentences when every journal article and book in our syllabus had writers doing exactly that.

asdff 5y ago

Everyone has a workflow and wants the input data cleansed how they like. Science journals are just the worst. So much time and money wasted by researchers just doing things like adding a hundred words to this paragraph for this submission, limiting the references to 30 for that one, putting the images all on one document for this journal, putting them in separate files for that one, making the figures independent, making all subfigures together on one page, using this dpi, using that margin with, page numbers yes, page numbers no. Editors should just ask for submissions to be in plain text, images just uploaded in whatever quality you have them, and then they could have a simple bash script do all their inane formatting and automatically fit sub figures evenly to a page. They'd probably complain this maybe 25 line script I'm imagining would put them out of work, though, so I'm not holding my breath.