Books of continuous text
Novels, essays, histories, memoirs. One text face, one measure, and a running decision about what to do with the few places that fight the grid: a long quotation, a letter, a list that lands four lines before the foot.
Editorial page layout · typesetting for print
Pages set so the reader never notices the setting
Dimas Saputro lays out books, reports, catalogues and periodicals for print, one title at a time. A manuscript and a folder of images go in; what comes back is a press-ready file in which the measure, the leading and the margins hold steady from the first page to the last.
The work is the part nobody is meant to see: a type specification written down before the first page is set, a baseline grid that survives a late insertion, and corrections tracked round by round so the third proof is shorter than the second.
What gets set here
Six kinds of job. They differ less in the software than in how much of the structure has to be invented before the first page can be laid.
Academic and technical books
Footnotes, tables, equations, figures with their own numbering, bibliography and an index set from the final page numbers. The apparatus has to stay with the passage it belongs to without tearing holes in the page.
Annual reports and institutional documents
Text set against charts, tables of figures and photographs, on a grid that keeps the numbers readable. Columns are sized to the widest figure that will ever appear in them, not to the first one.
Catalogues and listings
Repeating entries where one layout is designed and then used several hundred times. The work is in the exceptions: the entry with no image, the one with six, the one whose title runs to three lines.
Periodicals and bulletins
A template built once and handed over with it, so each issue is set faster than the one before. Masthead, running heads, standing sections and a page plan that can absorb a late article.
Reflowing and rescuing old files
A file set by someone else that no longer holds together: local overrides instead of styles, spaces used as indents, images at screen resolution. It is rebuilt on styles so the next edition is an afternoon, not a month.
What a set page is made of
Everything below is decided once, written into the specification, and then held across every page of the book. Half of typesetting is refusing to decide the same thing twice.
A spread with the margins, the baseline grid, the running heads and the folios marked. Text, image and caption all sit on the same set of lines.
What you send
- The final text, in one file per part, with the editing already done and the headings marked as headings rather than as large bold type.
- Images in the best version you have, named so that the name says where they go. Low-resolution scans are flagged before they are placed, not after.
- Anything the title already has to live with: a series design, a trim size, a publisher template, or a printer's specification.
- The date the printer expects the file, which is the date everything else is planned backwards from.
What comes back
- A written type specification: faces, sizes, leading, measure, margins and how each element behaves, so the next person can continue the book.
- A paginated proof for each round, with the pages numbered as they will be bound and the corrections from the previous round marked as done.
- Press-ready files to the printer's specification, checked page by page for missing links, overset text and images below resolution.
- The working file and its styles, handed over at the end. The book does not stay hostage to the person who set it.
How the rounds work
Four stages, agreed in writing before the first one starts. The number of correction rounds is part of the estimate, so a late rewrite is a conversation and not a surprise.
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Specimen pages first
Two or three spreads set from your real text, not from filler: an opening, a busy page and the worst case you have. You approve the look on those pages before the whole book is set, and changing your mind here costs nothing.
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First pages
The book is set complete and paginated, with a note listing every place where the text and the design disagreed and what was done about it. Queries come to you as a list with page numbers, not scattered through the file.
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Corrections, round by round
You mark the proof; the corrections are entered and checked against your mark-up, and the next proof shows what changed. Corrections that move text across a page break are flagged, because that is where new errors are made.
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Press-ready and handed over
Final pages are checked against the printer's specification, exported, and sent with the working file and the specification. Nothing is uploaded to a printer or paid for on your behalf.
Asked before the first specimen
If your question is not here, put it on the request page.
Can you work in the software my publisher uses?
Tell me which, and which version, before anything is agreed. Working in the chain the book already belongs to matters more than any preference of mine, and a file that cannot be opened downstream is worth nothing however it looks.
The text is not final. Can setting start anyway?
It can, and it usually costs more. Text that changes after pagination moves every page after it. If the editing is nearly done, waiting a week is normally cheaper than an extra round.
How is a job priced?
From the extent and the complexity: the number of pages, how much apparatus the text carries, how many images are placed, and how many correction rounds are included. The estimate says all four, in writing, before work starts.
Who answers an enquiry?
The person who would set the book, in writing, one enquiry at a time. Nothing on this site replies automatically or schedules anything by itself.
Have a manuscript waiting to be set?
Send the extent, the trim size and a sample of the worst page in it. You get specimen pages set from your own text, and an estimate in writing before anything else.