Conventional Publishing

Introduction

Conventional Publishing is the process of creating something that can be printed and distributed. In some cases, it can be left to the end-reader to print the document, in other cases it must be printed first. Either way, there are numerous possibilities, which can be handled in a number of formats.

Possibilities

If you see it on paper, it is possible. Cheap (and, in my experience, preferred) solutions involve a word processor and a colour inkjet printer. With modern technology, the output of a domestic printer is something that you can be proud of. The situation has moved with leaps and bounds since the beginning of the 90's when dot-matrix printers were common and LASERs were expensive and colour was a farce. Now, you can even go as far as to print your very own T-shirts with the same equipment that is sitting on your desk. A computer, a colour inkjet and a kit with some specially treated paper in it. That is it!
And, if T-shirts are possible, then imagine what can be done with regular paper!

To give you a few ideas, here are some past projects:

Frobnicate magazine - created on an Acorn computer and publically released in document form.
Scripts - these are teleplay scripts and although they are written using 1stWord+ (under RISC OS or under GEM), the effect is exactly what is wanted: something that looks effective but simple to print. Here, outline/truetype fonts are not required and neither are the overheads required to print them.
Curriculum Vitæs - supply what you want said and choose one of our standard CV layouts, or supply your own.
Advert sheet - a simple 'typed effect' pricelist.
Advert sheets - full colour with logo, product image, and text.
Itenerary lists, meeting "minutes" et cetera.

Supported formats

Work can be carried out and supplied in the following formats:

Acorn RISC OS
- Ovation
- Impression Style
- Acorn/Norcroft DTP
- Easiwriter
- 1stWord+
- Plain ASCII text (&0A newlines (RISC OS))
PC
- MS-WORD (6, 7, or 8 (Office 97))
- WordPerfect 5.1
- WORKS 4 (word processor component, can include data/sheets/graphs)
- 1stWord+ (under RISC OS - mostly compatible with GEM version)
- Plain ASCII text (&0D&0A newlines (DOS))
System inspecific
- RTF (Rich Text)
- PostScript (not usually editable)
- Printer raw data dump
- HTML (refer to this document for further details)

Data can be uploaded to your computer or website, or it will be supplied on magnetic media. This will usually be a DOS (1.44Mb) floppy disc or an ADFS (1.6Mb) floppy disc, depending upon your system. Files larger than will fit on a floppy disc may be compressed into a Spark or Zip archive. Files that will not fit on a floppy disc after archiving, or cannot be split across floppy discs, will be supplied on an iomega 100Mb ZIP disc (DOS format).
Sorry, other disc formats cannot be supplied. However practically every modern computer on the planet understands a basic DOS format disc.

If necessary, logos can be drawn, and images can be scanned/digitised. However it is preferred that images and text are supplied ready-to-go. Further information on request.

I am not a graphic designer or typographical layout consultant. Whilst I can provide you with suggestions or comments or even books on the subject, the final decisions always belong to you.

IMPORTANT! If you request work to be supplied in WORD format, please clearly and correctly state which version of WORD you are using. This is because different versions cannot quite format data created in other versions; the main culprits seemingly pagebreaks, numbered lists with multiple indenting, and things drawn with the built-in drawing utilities.
We recommend WORD version 7. It is more advanced than 6, and supports many of the facilities of WORD 8 (except HTML) and it seems quite stable (where 8 is rather buggy). In our experience, version 7 is one of the few to do numbered lists in a sane manner. This is, however, a purely personal opinion.

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