“I don’t know about you, but my mother never warned me about the real jungles. Oh, she warned me about the wild ways of the world, the dangerous-looking people with yellow neckties, and even the struggle to be real in this world of prefabricated lunch meat. But she never told me about the worst of it. She never told me about desktop publishing.”
Thus begins David Blatner’s book, Desktop Publisher’s Survival Kit. You may remember Blatner as the author of The QuarkXPress Book, also from Peachpit Press. Surely one of the very best writers on desktop publishing, Blatner offers a blend of professional guidance and an informal—sometimes irreverent—style.
This book is more generalized in approach than the Quark book; this book covers the entire field of desktop publishing, and gives information that will help you whether you use QuarkXPress, PageMaker, DesignStudio, or any other page layout program. Many of the ideas and concepts presented in the book will even help those using a word processing program to produce professional-looking documents. The best part is that is written in plain English—no techno-babble.
The book assumes that you know how to use your Mac (clicking, dragging, selecting, etc.), but it is not a “how-to,” step-by-step book. Rather it educates you in the theory of “electronic publishing theory.” You’ll learn what is important in the field, and you’ll understand why.
The book begins with a lucid chapter on graphic file formats, explaining the two basic flavors of computer graphics (bitmaps and vectors), and continuing on to discuss specific formats: Paint, PICT, EPS and TIFF, and their variants. There’s lots of good information here—when to use which format, and which ones to avoid. What works and what doesn’t. (Do you know when to not use the Clipboard?)
The third chapter covers Fonts (including a discussion of “a potential pitfall for the unwary: false styles.”) Chapter Four is on Word Processing, including typesetting conventions, copy preparation, and copy editing. You’ll find specific guidelines, such as avoiding underlining or all-caps for emphasis. (“All-capital letters should only be used in extreme emergencies or when typing acronyms. And even in these situations, you should probably use a small-caps style rather than true capital letters…”) Good advice.
The chapter on typesetting covers choosing typefaces, kerning and tracking, horizontal scaling, leading, secondary leading, and widow and orphan control (including “runts.”) A short chapter is devoted to stylesheets. (“The biggest secret to smart desktop publishing is saving your work often and making backup files. The second biggest secret is using paragraph styles.”)
Chapter 7, Scans and Halftones, covers the art of getting photographic images into your documents: how does resolution affect the number of possible grays? The chapter on Color gives realistic advice; (“If you follow the directions and leave the settings at their defaults, your job will probably look like mud.”) Different color models are discussed, as are such topics as trapping and overprinting, spot and process colors, and more.
The chapter on printing is one of the biggest in the book. It discusses strategies for getting your files to print, whether you’re working with a laser printer or a service bureau.
Chapter 10 is wittily titled “When Things Go Worng.” This is one of the most valuable chapters in the book; it is filled with specific advice on all sorts of problems, both software and hardware. Do you know how to tell when software gets corrupted? Do you know what to do about it? What can you do when your page refuses to print?
The final chapter gives advice on what software to buy. This section is surprisingly unbiased. Blatner tells which programs he uses, but he also discusses a variety of choices. He makes some specific recommendations, too, such as Suitcase II (or MasterJuggler), DeskPaint, ATM, QuicKeys, and others. He explains the benefits of each of these.
As a bonus, The Desktop Publisher’s Survival Kit comes with a disk containing a selection of shareware and freeware utilities, clip art, and laser fonts.
This book is as good for desktop publishers as The Little Mac Book is for Mac neophytes, and that’s saying a lot. If you’re in the field, whether greenhorn or old hand, this may be the best $23 you’ll ever spend.
