Hacker News Reader

Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

> If they are subcontracting the ebook dev process to a third party, perhaps not.

So they're not willing to provide the original source files, or what?

> edits late in the process are made to the typeset InDesign files, after the structure has been lost.

Wow, they do this so haphazardly that they don't even bother to go back to the original Word file and add the same edits?

Is InDesign used for all books? I don't see why you would need it for something without any figures/graphs/tables. You could just use Word, and things would work out fine.

View on HN

Word's typographical capabilities are just as bad as current ebooks. Word is absolutely not capable of producing professional quality text. So, while it may be useful for drafting a book, it is worthless for getting it ready for press.

As for why OCR is used, just look at the range of books that are now available electronically. There are a lot of books from the 1980s and earlier that are now available as EPUBs. Do you really think that it would have been easier to use the source files off floppies? (Keep in mind that the floppies are, for the most part, long gone.)

> As for why OCR is used, just look at the range of books that are now available electronically. There are a lot of books from the 1980s and earlier that are now available as EPUBs. Do you really think that it would have been easier to use the source files off floppies?

How are reprints of such books achieved?

Most likely, by using PostScript (edit: sometimes, even high-resolution raster) files that have no semantic markup and cannot be automatically reformatted in any way other than simple zooming/scaling. Such files are not much easier to transform into ebooks than scans are, but are probably harder to get access to.

This state of things is quite apalling. Given how small the source files are, I would've thought that publishers would keep an up-to-date copy of all of their books in a centralized repository.

Some publishers might do this. But it would be very surprising if any major publisher has been completely standardized on using the exact same toolchain and file formats for more than 20 years. Most publishers also have no incentive to modernize the markup for a book that's not getting any content updates.

With all due respect you are out of touch if you think MS word has anything to do with typesetting / laying out a printed page.

With all due respect I have extensively used Word, InDesign, & LaTeX and, contrary to your belief, typesetting can be (and is often) achieved in Word quite effectively.

How? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I am sincerely interested. Do you have any examples?

How about effectively dealing with ligatures?

Sure, ligatures have been supported for a while (since Office 2007, I believe). In any case, I was able to enable them in Office 2010. I would post a screenshot, but my Windows VM crashed when I tried to take one, and now refuses to start. I'm sure you can find info on it online.

I know that people like to harp on and on about how great LaTeX or InDesign are, and when it comes to complex layouts (particularly LaTeX if there are lots of referenced figures and InDesign for text wrapping, etc.), I agree. If you were writing a scientific article, I'd tell you to use LaTeX. If you were creating a magazine, I'd tell you to use InDesign.

But for your typical, text-only, fiction novel, the kind you're most likely to read on a Kindle? I don't think it really makes a difference.

I think they wanted examples of mainstream publishers that use/accept word files, rather than examples of word's capabilities.

(And even if they weren't, I would appreciate such examples.)

Well, as you can probably tell from my initial post, my knowledge of mainstream publishing practices is nil. Though from what I can discern, a lot of the problems have to do with poor technology usage.

People make a big deal about how using Word will lock you into a certain format when they're storing their data on floppies or, even worse, rasterizing it and keeping just the PS. Seems like the latter is a lot worse than the former.

FWIW, I don't think any publisher that uses an actual printing press uses Word to typeset books, simply because they almost certainly use the whole Adobe toolchain for prepress [1], and InDesign integrates much more nicely with this process. For example, Word has no facilities for color spaces, separation, or generating the actual plate images.

I guess they could generate PDFs from Word files with Acrobat and shoehorn them into the process, but any publisher that is actually satisfied with doing that is bonkers.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepress

If I wasn't fond of Emacs, I would probably do my writing in AbiWord or WordPad. Putting a lot of work in a bloated format like .doc(x) kind of scares me. Though maybe Word with rtf would perform well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com