Composition quality has a dual character: it can be
seen in the successful implementation of your design and in the avoidance
of errors in typography.
Quality in the initial stages of your project not only guarantees the
quality of the final job, but also improves your schedule and lowers
your cost—doing it right the first time saves both time and money!
Creating and revising sample pages
Every Generic project goes through three pre-layout procedures. In the
first of these, we set up templates and styles based on your design
specifications, which we use to generate sample pages showing all of
your design elements.
Our quality control staff then review these samples to confirm that
each style is correctly defined in our layout program. This results
in projects laid out to your specifications—accurately and the first
time.
Creating and fine-tuning fonts
Simultaneously with the generation of sample pages, the font requirements
(old style figures, special characters, special notation, breathing
symbols) of your project are determined. If there are any special characters,
we generate a new font so that all characters will be on a single font.
We do this because page layout programs do not allow for the use of
kerning tables on adjacent characters from different fonts. For instance,
old style numbers and roman letters traditionally reside on different
fonts—and therefore cannot be globally kerned. Other examples are
found wherever there are specialized symbols, such as musical sharp
or flat signs in text. By placing all of your font requirements on one
font, we are able to kern all required keystroke combinations. In addition,
this avoids the inadvertent use of a lining number in a book using old-style
figures.
The final step in the creation of type for your project is to kern
the font—to set it up in advance so that the en-dash will not run
into numbers like 4, 6, and 9; to make sure that em-dashes don't collide
with p or o; and to guarantee that accent marks line up correctly over
each character.
Creating a corrected manuscript file
As the templates, styles, and fonts are being created, we translate
the author's disks, scan clean manuscript, or keyboard edited manuscript
to generate an electronic file. This file is then made to match the
edited manuscript. At this same time, we produce the art, lay out the
tables, and create a file of captions for the book.
We then run out galleys of these final files for proofreading against
the edited manuscript. This guarantees that the marked corrections are
indeed made and eliminates the need to lay out pages again as a result
of an input error. It also means that a final review of pages can focus
on page layout, with the knowledge that all file corrections have been
made.
Page layout
Once all the pieces have been created and each has been checked for
accuracy, everything is ready for layout and all problems have been
resolved. At this point, a book with a relatively simple design can
be laid out in its entirety on one shift.
Generic's page layout takes into account standard practice regarding
spreads; placement of figures, tables, and footnotes; the amount of
text following heads near the bottom of the page; word stacks and hyphenated
lines; avoidance of rivers and widows; superscript sizing; use of ligatures;
and the avoidance of tracking to justify pages. And one final quality
control review of the page layout guarantees these conventional standards
are maintained.
As a result, the hallmark of pages from Generic Compositors is that
they are correct to your specifications—the first time. Because
of the high quality of the first pages, final corrections are minimal
(we daresay you will not find cleaner sets of proof from any other compositor);
schedules are maintained; and costs are controlled.
And, as a final indication of the quality of Generic Compositors:
- We never charge for AAs. Once we have committed to a price, we will
deliver a project that lives up to your standards and those of your
author. Corrections to proof from the author, editor, or designer
are made at no additional cost to you.
- We are a preferred compositor of Thomson-Shore. This printer, a
most highly regarded supplier of printing and binding to our industry,
recognizes the quality of projects from Generic and therefore gives
a discount to you on printer files developed by us. Incidentally,
we extend this discount to you: regardless of the printer you select,
the cost of books with final output to printer files tend to run about
10% less than projects requiring repro.
For further information, please email us, including your name, affiliation, and areas of interest,
and we will get back to you quickly.
